The INSUPPRESSIBLE BOOK 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
„ 13 L z 7 / 8 ., 



UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. 



THE 



INSUPPHESSIBLE BOOK 



3, €ontxovtx8Q 



Herbert Spencer and Frederic Harrison. 



FROM THE "NINETEENTH CENTURY" AND 

"PALL MALL GAZETTE," WITH 

COMMENTS BY 

GAIL HAMILTON. 



I 




Boston : 
S. E. CASSINO AND COMPANY. 

1885. 



l^ 7 



<1* 






Copyright, by 

S. E. CASSINO & CO. 

r88j. 



Electrotyped by 
C. J. Pbtbrs and Son, Boston. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Religion : A Retrospect and Prospect 1 

The Ghost of Religion 23 

Retrogressive Religion 46 

Agnostic Metaphysics 90 

Last Words about Agnosticism and the Religion of 

Humanity 140 

Mr. Herbert Spencer and Agnosticism 164 

COMMENTS. 

The Gospel according to Herbert Spencer .... 170 

The Gospel according to Frederic Harrison ... 193 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God ... 230 

Casus Belli 258 



RELIGION: 

A RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 1 

Unlike the ordinary consciousness, the religious 
consciousness is concerned with that which lies be- 
yond the sphere of sense. A brute thinks only of 
things which can be touched, seen, heard, tasted, etc. ; 
and the like is true of the untaught child, the deaf- 
mute, and the lowest savage. But the developing 
man has thoughts about existences which he regards 
as usually intangible, inaudible, invisible ; and yet 
which he regards as operative upon him. What sug- 
gests this notion of agencies transcending percep- 
tion? How do these ideas concerning the supernat- 
ural evolve out of ideas concerning the natural? 
The transition cannot be sudden ; and an account of 
the genesis of religion must begin by describing the 
steps through which the transition takes place. 

The ghost-theory exhibits these steps quite clearly. 
We are shown by it that the mental differentiation of 

i The statements concerning matters of fact in the first part of 
this article are based on the contents of Part I. of The Principles 
of Sociology. 

1 



2 religion; a retrospect and prospect. 

invisible and intangible beings from visible and tan- 
gible beings progresses slowly and unobtrusively. In 
the fact that the other-self, supposed to wander in 
(beams, is believed to have actually done and seen 
whatever was dreamed — in the fact that the other- 
self when going away at death, but expected pres- 
ently to return, is conceived as a double equally 
material with the original; we see that the super- 
natural agent in its primitive form diverges very 
little from the natural agent — is simply the original 
man with some added powers of going about secretly 
and doing good or evil. And the fact that when the 
double of the dead man ceases to be dreamed about 
by those who knew him, his non-appearance in dreams 
is held to imply that he is finally dead, shows that 
these earliest supernatural agents are conceived as 
having but a temporary existence : the first tenden- 
cies to a permanent consciousness of the supernatural 
prove abortive. 

In many cases no higher degree of differentiation 
is reached. The ghost-population, recruited by 
deaths on the one side, but on the other side losing 
its members as they cease to be recollected and 
dreamed about, does not increase; and no individ- 
uals included in it come to be recognized through 
successive generations as established supernatural 
powers. Thus the Unkulunkulu, or old-old one, of the 
Zulus, the father of the race, is regarded as finally or 
completely dead; and there is propitiation only of 
ghosts of more recent date. But where circum- 
stances favor the continuance of sacrifices at graves, 



HERBERT SPENCER. 6 

witnessed by members of each new generation, who 
are told about the dead and transmit the tradition, 
there eventually arises the conception of a perma- 
nently-existing ghost or spirit. A more marked con- 
trast in thought between supernatural beings and 
natural beings is thus established. There simulta- 
neously results a great increase in the number of these 
supposed supernatural beings, since the aggregate of 
them is now continually added to; and there is a 
strengthening tendency to think of them as- every- 
where around, and as causing all unusual occurrences. 

Differences among the ascribed powers of ghosts 
soon arise. They naturally follow the observed 
differences among the powers of living individuals. 
Hence it results that while the propitiations of ordi- 
nary ghosts are made only by their descendants, it 
comes occasionally to be thought prudent to propi- 
tiate also the ghosts of the more dreaded individuals, 
even though they have no claims of blood. Quite 
early there thus begin those grades of supernatural 
beings which eventually become so strongly marked. 

Habitual wars, which more than all other causes 
initiate these first differentiations, go on to initiate 
further and more decided ones. For with those 
compoundings of small societies into greater ones, 
and re-compounding of these into still greater, which 
war effects, there, of course, with the multiplying 
gradations of power among living men, arises the 
conception of multiplying gradations of power among 
their ghosts. Thus in course of time are formed the 
conceptions of the great ghosts or gods, the more 



4 RELIGION; A RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 

numerous secondary ghosts or clemi-gocls, and so on 
downwards— a pantheon: there being still, however, 
no essential distinction of kind; as we see in the 
calling of ordinary ghosts manes-gods by the Romans 
and elohim by the Hebrews. Moreover, repeating as 
the other life in the other world does the life in this 
world, in its needs, occupations, and social organiza- 
tion, there arises not only a differentiation of grades 
among supernatural beings in respect of their powers, 
but also in respect of their characters and kinds of 
activity. There come to be local gods, and gods 
reigning over this or that order of phenomena; there 
come to be good and evil spirits of various qualities ; 
and where there has been by conquest a superposing of 
societies one upon another, each having its own sys- 
tem of ghost-derived beliefs, there results an involved 
combination of such beliefs, constituting a mythology. 
Of course ghosts primarily being doubles like the 
originals in all things; and gods (when not the living 
members of a conquering race) being doubles of the 
more powerful men ; it results that they, too, are 
originally no less human than other ghosts in their 
physical characters, their passions, and their intelli- 
gences. Like the doubles of the ordinary dead, they 
arc supposed to consume the flesh, blood, bread, wine, 
:i t<» them : at first literally, and later in a more 
spiritual way by consuming the essences of them. 
They not only appear as visible and tangible persons, 
but they enter into conflicts with men, are wounded, 
suffer pain: the sole distinction being that they have 
miraculous powers of healing and consequent immor- 



HERBERT SPEXCEE. 5 

tality. Here, indeed, there needs a qualification ; for 
not only do various peoples hold that the gods die a 
first death (as naturally happens where they are 
members of a conquering race, called gods because of 
their superiority), but, as in the case of Pan, it is 
supposed, even among the cultured, that there is a 
second and final death of a god, like that second and 
final death of a man supposed among existing sav- 
ages. With advancing civilization the divergence of 
the supernatural being from the natural being be- 
comes more decided. There is nothing to check the 
gradual de-materialization of the ghost and of the 
god; and this de-materialization is insensibly fur- 
thered in the effort to reach consistent ideas of super- 
natural action : the god ceases to be tangible, and 
later he ceases to be visible or audible. Along with 
this differentiation of physical attributes from those 
of humanity, there goes on more slowly the differen- 
tiation of mental attributes. The god of the savage, 
represented as having intelligence scarcely, if at all, 
greater than that of the living man, is deluded with 
ease. Even the gods of the semi-civilized are de- 
ceived, make mistakes, repent of their plans ; and 
only in course of time does there arise the concep- 
tion of unlimited vision and universal knowledge. 
The emotional nature simultaneously undergoes a 
parallel transformation. The grosser passions, orig- 
inally conspicuous and carefully ministered to by 
devotees, gradually fade, leaving only the passions 
less related to corporeal satisfactions ; and eventually 
these, too, become partially de-humanized. 



6 religion; a retrospect and prospect. 

These ascribed characters of deities are continually 
adapted and re-adapted to the needs of the social 
state. During the militant phase of activity, the 
chief god is conceived as holding insubordination the 
greatest crime, as implacable in anger, as merciless in 
punishment ; and any alleged attributes of a milder 
kind occupy but small space in the social consciousness. 
But where militancy declines and the harsh, despotic 
form of government appropriate to it is gradually 
qualified by the form appropriate to industrialism, 
the foreground of the religious consciousness is 
increasingly filled with those ascribed traits of the 
divine nature which are congruous with the ethics of 
peace ; divine love, divine forgiveness, divine mercy, 
are now the characteristics enlarged upon. 

To perceive clearly the effects of mental progress 
and changing social life thus stated in the abstract, 
we must glance at them in the concrete. If, without 
foregone conclusions, we contemplate the traditions, 
records, and monuments of the Egyptians, we see 
that out of their primitive ideas of gods, brute or 
human, there were evolved spiritualized ideas of 
gods, and finally of a god ; until the priesthoods of 
later times, repudiating the earlier ideas, described 
them as corruptions: being swayed by the universal 
tendency to regard the first state as the highest — a 
tendency traceable down to the theories of existing 
theologians and mythologists. Again, if, putting 
aside speculations, and not asking what historical 
value the Iliad may have, we take it simply as indi- 
cating the early Greek notion of Zeus, and compare 



HERBERT SPEXCER. i 

this with the notion contained in the Platonic dia- 
logues ; we see that Greek civilization had greatly 
modified (in the better minds, at least) the purely 
anthropomorphic conception of him : the lower hu- 
man attributes being dropped and the higher ones 
transfigured. Similarly, if we contrast the Hebrew 
God described in primitive traditions, manlike in ap- 
pearance, appetites, and emotions, with the Hebrew 
God as characterized by the prophets, there is shown 
a widening range of power along with a nature in- 
creasingly remote from that of man. And on passing 
to the conceptions of him which are now entertained, 
we are made aware of an extreme transfiguration.. 
By a convenient obliviousness, a deity who in early 
times is represented as hardening men's hearts so 
that they may commit punishable acts, and as em- 
ploying a lying spirit to deceive them, comes to be 
mostly thought of as an embodiment of virtues trans- 
cending the highest we can imagine. 

Thus, recognizing the fact that in the primitive 
human mind there exists neither religious idea nor 
religious sentiment, we find that in the course of 
social evolution and the evolution of intelligence 
accompanying it, there are generated both the ideas 
and sentiments which we distinguish as religious ; 
and that through a process of causation clearly trace- 
able, they traverse those stages which have brought 
them, among civilized races, to their present forms. 

And now what may we infer will be the evolution 
of religious ideas and sentiments throughout the 



8 religion; a retrospect and prospect. 

future ? On the one hand it is irrational to suppose 
that the changes which have brought the religious 
consciousness to its present form will suddenly cease. 
On the other hand, it is irrational to suppose that 
the religious consciousness, naturally generated as 
we have seen, will disappear and leave an unfilled 
gap. Manifestly it must undergo further changes ; 
and however much changed it must continue to 
exist. What then are the transformations to be ex- 
pected ? If we reduce the process above delineated 
to its lowest terms, we shall see our way to an an- 
swer. 

As pointed out in First Principles, § 96, Evolution 
is throughout its course habitually modified by that 
Dissolution which eventually undoes it : the changes 
which become manifest being usually but the differ- 
ential results of opposing tendencies towards integra- 
tion and disintegration. Rightly to understand the 
genesis and decay of religious systems, and the prob- 
able future of those now existing, we must take this 
truth into account. During those earlier changes by 
which there is created a hierarchy of gods, demi-gods, 
manes-gods, and spirits of various kinds and ranks, 
evolution goes on with but little qualification. The 
consolidated mythology produced, while growing in 
the mass of supernatural beings composing it, as- 
sumes increased heterogeneity along with increased 
definiteness in the arrangement of its parts and the 
attributes of its members. But the antagonist Disso- 
lution eventually gains predominance. The spread- 
ing recognition of natural causation conflicts with 



HERBERT SPEXCER. 9 

this mythological evolution, and insensibly weakens 
those of its beliefs which are most at variance with 
advancing knowledge. Demons and the secondary 
divinities presiding over divisions of Nature become 
less thought of as the phenomena ascribed to them 
are more commonly observed to follow a constant 
order; and hence these minor components of the 
mythology slowly dissolve away. At the same time, 
with growing supremacy of the great god heading 
the hierarchy, there goes increasing ascription to 
him of actions which were before distributed among 
numerous supernatural beings : there is integration 
of power. While in proportion as there arises the 
consequent conception of an omnipotent and omni- 
present deity, there is a gradual fading of his alleged 
human attributes : dissolution begins to affect the 
supreme personality in respect of ascribed form and 
nature. 

Already, as we have seen, this process has in the 
more advanced societies, and especially among their 
higher members, gone to the extent of merging all 
minor supernatural powers in one supernatural power ; 
and already this one supernatural power has, by what 
Mr. Fiske aptly calls de-anthropomorphization, lost 
the grosser attributes of humanity. If things here- 
after are to follow the same general course as hereto- 
fore, we must infer that this dropping of human attri- 
butes will continue. Let us ask what positive changes 
are hence to be expected. 

Two factors must unite in producing them. There 
is the development of those higher sentiments which 



10 religion; a retrospect and prospect. 

no longer tolerate the ascription of inferior senti- 
ments to a divinity; and there is the intellectual 
development which causes dissatisfaction with the 
crude interpretations previously accepted. Of course 
in pointing out the effects of these factors, I must 
name some which are familiar : but it is needful to 
glance at them along with others. 

The cruelty of a Fijian god who, represented as 
devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to 
inflict torture during the process, is small compared 
with the cruelty of a god who condemns men to tor- 
tures which are eternal ; and the ascription of this 
cruelty, though habitual in ecclesiastical formulas, 
occasionally occurring in sermons, and still some- 
times pictorially illustrated, is becoming so intolera- 
ble to the better-natured, that while some theologians 
distinctly deny it, others quietly drop it out of their 
teachings. Clearly, this change cannot cease until 
the beliefs in hell and damnation disappear. 1 Dis- 
appearance of them will be aided by an increasing 
repugnance to injustice. The visiting on Adam's 
descendants through hundreds of generations dread- 
ful penalties for a small transgression which they 
did not commit; the damning of all men who do not 
avail themselves of an alleged mode of obtaining for- 
giveness, which most men have never heard of; and 

1 To meet a possible criticism, it may be well to remark that 
whatever force they may have against deists (and they have very 
little), Butler's arguments concerning these and allied beliefs do 
not tell at all airainst agnostics. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 11 

the effecting a reconciliation by sacrificing a son who 
was perfectly innocent, to satisfy the assumed neces- 
sity for a propitiatory victim ; are modes of action 
which, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth 
expressions of abhorrence ; and the ascription of them 
to the Ultimate Cause of things, even now felt to be 
full of difficulties, must become impossible. So, too, 
must die out the belief that a Power present in innu- 
merable worlds throughout infinite space, and who 
during millions of years of the Earth's earlier exist- 
ence needed no honoring by its inhabitants, should 
be seized with a craving for praise ; and having 
created mankind, should be angry with them if they 
do not perpetually tell him how great he is. As fast 
as men escape from that glamour of early impressions 
which prevents them from thinking, they will refuse 
to imply a trait of character which is the reverse of 
Worshipful. 

Similarly with the logical incongruities more and 
more conspicuous to growing intelligence. Passing 
over the familiar difficulties that sundry of the im- 
plied divine traits are in contradiction with the di- 
vine attributes otherwise ascribed — that a god who 
repents of what he has done must be lacking either 
in power or in foresight ; that his anger presupposes 
an occurrence which has been contrar}^ to intention, 
and so indicates defect of means ; we come to the 
deeper difficulty that such emotions, in common with 
all emotions, can exist only in a consciousness which 
is limited. Every emotion has its antecedent ideas, 
and antecedent ideas are habitually supposed to occur 



12 religion; a retrospect and prospect. 

in God : he is represented as seeing and hearing this 
or the other, and as being emotionally affected there- 
by. That is to say, the conception of a divinity 
possessing these traits of character, necessarily con- 
tinues anthropomorphic ; not only in the sense that 
the emotions ascribed are like those of human beings, 
but also in the sense that they form parts of a con- 
sciousness which, like the human consciousness, is 
formed of successive states. And such a conception 
of the divine consciousness is irreconcilable both with 
the unchangeableness otherwise alleged, and with the 
omniscience otherwise alleged. For a consciousness 
constituted of ideas and feelings caused by objects 
and occurrences, cannot be simultaneously occupied 
with all objects and all occurrences throughout the 
universe. To believe in a divine consciousness, men 
must refrain from thinking what is meant by con- 
sciousness — must stop short with verbal proposi- 
tions ; and propositions which they are debarred from 
rendering into thoughts will more and more fail to 
satisfy them. Of course like difficulties present them- 
selves when the will of God is spoken of. So long 
as we refrain from giving a definite meaning to the 
word will, we may say that it is possessed by the 
Cause of All Things, as readily as we may say that 
love of approbation is possessed by a circle ; but when 
from the words we pass to the thoughts they stand 
for, we find that we can no more unite in conscious- 
ness the terms of the one proposition than we can 
those of the other. Whoever conceives any other 
will than his own must do so in terms of his own 



HERBERT SPENCER. 13 

will, which is the sole will directly known to him — 
all other wills being only inferred. But will, as each 
is conscious of it, presupposes a motive — a prompt- 
ino- desire of some kind: absolute indifference ex- 
eludes the conception of will. Moreover will, as 
implying a prompting desire, connotes some end con- 
templated as one to be achieved, and ceases with the 
achievement of it ; some other will, referring to some 
other end, taking its place. That is to say, will, like 
emotion, necessarily supposes a series of states of 
consciousness. The conception of a divine will, de- 
rived from that of the human will, involves, like it, 
localization in space and time ; the willing of each 
end, excluding from consciousness for an interval 
the willing of other ends, and therefore being incon- 
sistent with that omnipresent activity which simul- 
taneously works out an infinity of ends. It is the 
same with the ascription of intelligence. Not to 
dwell on the seriality and limitation implied as be- 
fore, we may note that intelligence, as alone conceiv- 
able by us, presupposes existences independent of it 
and objective to it. It is carried on in terms of 
changes primarily wrought by alien activities — the 
impressions generated by things beyond conscious- 
ness, and the ideas derived from such impressions. 
To speak of an intelligence which exists in the ab- 
sence of all such alien activities, is to use a meaning- 
less word. If to the corollary that the First Cause, 
considered as intelligent, must be continually affected 
by independent objective activities, it is replied that 
these have become such by act of creation, and were 



14 RELIGION; A RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 

previously included in the First Cause ; then the 
reply is that in such case the First Cause could be- 
fore this creation, have had nothing to generate in it 
such changes as those constituting what we call in- 
telligence, and must therefore have been unintelli- 
gent at the time when intelligence was most called 
for. Hence it is clear that the intelligence ascribed, 
answers in no respect to that which we know by 
the name. It is intelligence out of which all the 
characters constituting it have vanished. 

These and other difficulties, some of which are 
often discussed but never disposed of, must force men 
hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic char- 
acters given to the First Cause, as they have long 
since dropped the lower. The conception which has 
been enlarging from the beginning must go on en- 
larging, until by disappearance of its limits, it becomes 
a consciousness which transcends the forms of dis- 
tinct thought, though it for ever remains a conscious- 
ness. 

' But how can such a final consciousness of the 
Unknowable, thus tacitly alleged to be true, be 
reached by successive modifications of a conception 
which was utterly untrue ? The ghost-theory of the 
savage is baseless. The material double of a dead 
man in which he believes, never had any existence. 
And if by gradual de-materialization of this .double 
was produced the conception of the supernatural 
agent in general — if the conception of a deity, 
formed by the dropping of some human attributes 



HERBERT SPEXCER. 15 

and transfiguration of others, resulted from con- 
tinuance of this process ; is not the developed and 
purified conception reached by pushing the process 
to its limit, a fiction also ? Surely if the primitive 
belief was absolutely false, all derived beliefs must be 
absolutely false.' 

This objection looks fatal ; and it would be fatal 
were its premises valid. Unexpected as it will be to 
most readers, the answer here to be made is that at 
the outset a germ of truth was contained in the 
primitive conception — the truth, namely, that the 
power which manifests itself in consciousness is but 
a differently conditioned form of the power which 
manifests itself beyond consciousness. 

Every voluntary act yields to the primitive .man a 
proof of a source of energy within him. Not that he 
thinks about his internal experiences ; but in these 
experiences this notion lies latent. When producing 
motion in his limbs, and through them motion in other 
things, he is aware of the accompanying feeling of 
effort. And this sense of effort, which is the perceived 
antecedent of changes produced by him, becomes the 
conceived antecedent of changes not produced by 
him — furnishes him with a term of thought by which 
to represent the genesis of these objective changes. 
At first this idea of muscular force as anteceding un- 
usual events around him, carries with it the whole 
assemblage of associated ideas. He thinks of the 
implied effort as an effort exercised by a being just 
like himself. In course of time these doubles of the 
dead, supposed to be workers of all but the most 



16 RELIGION; A RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 

familiar changes, are modified in conception. Be- 
sides becoming less grossly material, some of them 
are developed into larger personalities presiding over 
classes of phenomena which being comparatively reg- 
ular in their order, suggest a belief in beings who, 
while more powerful than men, are less variable in 
their modes of action. So that the idea of force as 
exercised by such beings, comes to be less associated 
with the idea of a human ghost. Further advances, 
by which minor supernatural agents are merged in 
one general agent, and by which the personality of 
this general agent is rendered vague while becoming 
widely extended, tend still further to dissociate the 
notion of objective force from the force known as 
such in consciousness ; and the dissociation reaches 
its extreme in the thoughts of the man of science, 
who interprets in terms of force not only the visible 
changes of sensible bodies, but all physical changes 
whatever, even up to the undulations of the ethereal 
medium. Nevertheless, this force (be it force under 
that statical form by which matter resists, or under 
that dynamical form distinguished by energy) is to 
the last thought of in terms of that internal energy 
which he is conscious of as muscular effort. He is 
compelled to symbolize objective force in terms of 
subjective force from lack of any other symbol. 

See now the implications. That internal energy 
which in the experiences of the primitive man was 
always the immediate antecedent of changes wrought 
by him — that energy which, when interpreting ex- 
ternal changes, he thought of along with those attri- 



HERBERT SPENCER. 17 

butes of a human personality connected with it in 
himself; is the same energy which, freed from 
anthropomorphic accompaniments, is now figured as 
the cause of all external phenomena. The last stage 
reached is recognition of the truth that force as it 
exists beyond consciousness, cannot be like what we 
know as force within consciousness ; and that yet, as 
either is capable of generating the other, they must 
be different modes of the same. Consequently, the 
final outcome of that speculation commenced by the 
primitive man, is that the Power manifested through- 
out the Universe distinguished as material, is the 
same power which in ourselves wells up under the 
form of consciousness. 

It is untrue, then, that the foregoing argument 
proposes to evolve a true belief from a belief that 
was wholly false. Contrariwise, the ultimate form of 
the religious consciousness is the final development 
of a consciousness which at the outset contained a 
germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors. 

Those who think that science is dissipating relig- 
ious beliefs and sentiments, seem unaware that what- 
ever of mystery is taken from the old interpretation 
is added to the new. Or rather, we may say that 
transference from the one to the other is accompanied 
by increase ; since, for an explanation which has a 
seeming feasibility, science substitutes an explana- 
tion which, carrying us back only a certain distance, 
there leaves us in presence of the avowedly inexpli- 
cable. 

Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a 



18 religion; a retrospect and prospect. 

gradual transfiguration of Nature. Where ordinary 
perception saw perfect simplicity it reveals great 
complexity; where there seemed absolute inertness it 
discloses intense activity ; and in what appears mere 
vacancy it finds a marvellous play of forces. Each 
generation of physicists discovers in so-called 'brute 
matter ' powers which, but a few years before, the 
most instructed physicist would have thought in- 
credible ; as instance the ability of a mere iron plate 
to take up the complicated aerial vibrations produced 
by articulate speech, which, translated into multitu- 
dinous and varied electric pulses, are re-translated a 
thousand miles off by another iron plate and again 
heard as articulate speech. When the explorer of 
Nature sees that, quiescent as they appear, surround- 
ing solid bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are 
infinitesimal in their amounts — when the spectro- 
scope proves to him that molecules on the Earth 
pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars — 
when there is forced on him the inference that every 
point in space thrills with an infinity of vibrations 
passing through it in all directions ; the concep- 
tion to which he tends is much less that of a Uni- 
verse of. dead matter than that of a Universe every- 
where alive : alive if not in the restricted sense, still 
in a general sense. 

This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physi- 
cists continually increase, is aided by that other 
transfiguration resulting from metaphysical inqui- 
ries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that 
our scientific interpretations of the phenomena which 



HERBERT SPENCER. 19 

objects present, are expressed in terms of our own 
variously-combined sensations and ideas — are ex- 
pressed, that is, in elements belonging to conscious- 
ness, which are but symbols of the something beyond 
consciousness. Though analysis afterwards reinstates 
our primitive beliefs, to the extent of showing that 
behind every group of phenomenal manifestations 
there is always a nexus, which is the reality that re- 
mains fixed amid appearances which are variable; yet 
we are shown that this nexus of reality is forever 
inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, 
we remember that the activities constituting con- 
sciousness, being rigorously bounded, cannot bring in 
among themselves the activities beyond the bounds, 
which therefore seem unconscious, though production 
of either by the other seems to imply that they are 
of the same essential nature ; this necessity we are 
under to think of the external energy in terms of the 
internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a 
materialistic aspect to the Universe: further thought, 
however, obliging us to recognize the truth that a 
conception given in phenomenal manifestations of this 
ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is. 

While the beliefs to which analytic science thus 
leads are such as do not destroy the object-matter of 
religion, but simply transfigure it, science under its 
concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious senti- 
ment. From the very beginning the progress of 
knowledge has been accompanied by an increasing 
capacity for wonder. Among savages, the lowest 
are the least surprised when shown remarkable pro- 



20 RELIGION; A RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 

ducts of civilized art: astonishing the traveller by 
their indifference. And so little of the marvellous 
do they perceive in the grandest phenomena of 
Nature, that any inquiries concerning them they 
regard as childish trifling. This contrast in mental 
attitude between the lowest human beings and the 
highest human beings around us, is paralleled by 
the contrasts among the grades of these higher 
human beings themselves. It is not the rustic, 
nor the artisan, nor the trader, who sees some- 
thing more than a mere matter of course in the 
hatching of a chick; but it is the biologist, who, 
pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phenom- 
ena, reaches his greatest perplexity Avhen a speck 
of protoplasm under the microscope shows him life 
in its simplest form, and makes him feel that however 
he formulates its processes the actual play of forces 
remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary 
tourist nor in the deer-stalker climbing the moun- 
tains above him, does a highland glen rouse ideas 
beyond those of sport or of the picturesque ; but it 
may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing 
that the glacier-rounded rock he sits on has lost by 
weathering but half-an-inch of its surface since a time 
far more remote than the beginnings of human civil- 
ization, and then trying to conceive the slow denu- 
dation which has cut out the whole valley, lias 
thoughts of time and of power to which they are 
strangers — thoughts which, already utterly inade- 
quate to their objects, he feels to be still more futile 
on noting the contorted beds of gneiss around, which 



HERBERT SPENCER. 21 

tell him of a time, immeasurably more remote, when 
far beneath the Earth's surface they were in a half- 
melted state, and again tell him of a time, immensely 
exceeding this in remoteness, when their components 
were sand and mud on the shores of an ancient sea. 
Nor is it in the primitive peoples who suppose that 
the heavens rested on the mountain tops, any more 
than in the modern inheritors of their cosmogony 
who repeat that 'the heavens declare the glory of 
God,' that we find the largest conceptions of the 
Universe or the greatest amount of wonder excited 
by contemplation of it. Rather, it is in the astronomer, 
who sees in the Sun a mass so vast that even into one 
of his spots our Earth might be plunged without 
touching its edges ; and who by every finer telescope 
is shown an increased multitude of such suns, many 
of them far larger. 

Hereafter, as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper 
insight will raise rather than lower this sentiment. 
At present the most powerful and most instructed 
mind has neither the knowledge nor the capacity 
required for symbolizing in thought the totality of 
things. Occupied with one or other division of 
Nature, the man of science usually does not know 
enough of the other divisions even rudely to conceive 
the extent and complexity of their phenomena; and 
supposing him to have adequate knowledge of each, 
yet he is unable to think of them as a whole. Wider 
and stronger intellect may hereafter help him to 
form a vague consciousness of them in their totality. 
We may say that just as an undeveloped musical 



22 RELIGION; A RETROSPECT and prospect. 

faculty, able only to appreciate a simple melody, 
cannot grasp the variously-entangled passages and 
harmonies of a symphony, which in the minds of 
composer and conductor are unified into involved 
musical effects awakening far greater feeling than is 
possible to the musically uncultured ; so, by future 
more evolved intelligences, the course of things now 
apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible all 
together, with an accompanying feeling as much 
beyond that of the present cultured man, as his feel- 
ing is beyond that of the savage. 

And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but to 
be increased by that analysis of knowledge which, 
while forcing him to agnosticism, yet continually 
prompts him to imagine some solution of the Great 
Enigma which he knows cannot be solved. Especially 
must this be so when he remembers that the very no- 
tions, beginning and end, cause and purpose, are rela- 
tive notions belonging to human thought which are 
probably irrelevant to the Ultimate Reality transcend- 
ing human thought; and when, though suspecting 
that explanation is a word without meaning when ap- 
plied to this Ultimate Reality, he yet feels compelled 
to think there must be an explanation. 

But amid the mysteries which become the more 
mysterious the more they are thought about, there 
will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever 
in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from 
which all things proceed. 

Herbert Spencer. 



THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

Ix the January number of this Review is to be 
found an article on Religion which has justly awa- 
kened a profound and sustained interest. The 
creed of Agnosticism was there formulated anew by 
the acknowledged head of the Evolution philosophy, 
with a defmiteness such as perhaps it never wore 
before. To my mind there is nothing in the whole 
range of modern religious discussion more cogent 
and more suggestive than the array of conclusions 
the final outcome of which is marshalled in those 
twelve pages. It is the last word of the Agnostic 
philosophy in its long controversy with Theology. 
That word is decisive, and it is hard to conceive how 
Theology can rally for another bout from such a 
sorites of dilemma as is there presented. My own 
humble purpose is not to criticise this paper, but to 
point its practical moral, and, if I may, to add to it a 
rider of my own. As a summary of philosophical con- 
clusions on the theological problem, it seems to me 
frankly unanswerable. Speaking generally, I shall 
now dispute no part of it but one word, and that is 
the title. It is entitled 'Religion.' To me it is 

23 



24 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

rather the Ghost of Religion. Religion as a living 
force lies in a different sphere. 

The essay, which is packed with thought to a 
degree unusual even with Mr. Herbert Spencer, con- 
tains evidently three parts. The first (pp. 1-7) deals 
with the historical Evolution of Religion, of which 
Mr. Spencer traces the germs in the primitive belief 
in ghosts. The second (pp. 7-14) arrays the moral 
and intellectual dilemmas involved in all anthropo- 
morphic theology into one long catena of difficulty, 
out of which it is hard to conceive any free mind 
emerging with success. The third part (pp. 14-22) 
deals with the evolution of Religion in the future, 
and formulates, more precisely than has ever yet 
been effected, the positive creed of Agnostic phil- 
osophy. 

Has, then, the Agnostic a positive creed? It 
would seem so ; for Mr. Spencer brings us at last 
'to the one absolute certainty, the presence of an 
Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things 
proceed.' But let no one suppose that this is merely 
a new name for the Great First Cause of so many 
theologies and metaphysics. In spite of the capital 
letters, and the use of theological terms as old as 
Isaiah or Athanasius, Mr. Spencer's Energy has no 
analogy with God. It is Eternal, Infinite, and In- 
comprehensible; but still it is not He, but It. It 
remains always Energy, Force, nothing anthropomor- 
phic ; such as electricity, or anything else that we 
might conceive as the ultimate basis of all the physi- 
cal forces. None of the positive attributes ^ which 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 25 

have ever been predicated of God can be used of this 
Energy. Neither goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice, 
nor consciousness, nor will, nor life, can be ascribed, 
even by analogy, to this Force. Now a force to 
which we cannot apply the ideas of goodness, wis- 
dom, justice, consciousness, or life, any more than we 
can to a circle, is certainly not God, has no analogy 
with God, nor even with what Pope has called the 
'Great First Cause, least understood.' It shares 
some of the negative attributes of God and First 
Cause, but no positive one. It is, in fact, only the 
Unknowable a little more defined ; though I do not 
remember that Mr. Spencer, or any evolution philo- 
sopher, has ever formulated the Unknowable in terms 
with so deep a theological ring as we hear in the 
phrase ' Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all 
things proceed.' 

The terms do seem, perhaps, rather needlessly big 
and absolute. And fully accepting Mr. Spencer's 
logical canons, one does not see why it should be 
called an 'absolute certainty.' 'Practical belief 
satisfies me ; and I doubt the legitimacy of substitut- 
ing for it ' absolute certainty.' ' Infinite ' and ' Eter- 
nal,' also, can mean to Mr. Spencer nothing more 
than ' to which we know no limits, no beginning or 
end,' and, for my part, I prefer to say this. Again, 
'an Energy' — why A>r Energ}*? The Unknowable 
may certainly consist of more than one energy. To 
assert the presence of one uniform energy is to pro- 
fess to know something very important about the 
Unknowable : that it is homogeneous, and even iden- 



26 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

tical, throughout the Universe. And then, 'from 
which all things proceed ' is perhaps a rather equi- 
vocal reversion to the theologic type. In the Atha- 
nasian Creed the Third Person c proceeds ' from the 
First and Second. But this process has always been 
treated as a mystery ; and it would be safer to avoid 
the phrases of mysticism. Let us keep the old words, 
for we all mean much the same thing ;- and I prefer 
to put it thus. All observation and meditation, 
Science and Philosophy, bring us c to the practical 
belief that man is ever in the presence of some energy 
or energies, of which he knows nothing, and to which 
therefore he would be wise to assign no limits, con- 
ditions, or functions.' This is, doubtless, what Mr. 
Spencer himself means. For my part, I prefer his 
old term, the Unknowable. Though I have always 
thought that it would be more philosophical not to 
assert of the Unknown that it is Unknowable. And, 
indeed, I would rather not use the capital letter, but 
stick literally to our evidence, and say frankly ' the 
unknown.' 

Thus viewed, the attempt, so to speak, to put a 
little unction into the Unknowable is hardly worth 
the philosophical inaccuracy it involves ; and such is 
the drawback to any use of picturesque language. 
So stated, the positive creed of Agnosticism still 
retains its negative character. It has a series of 
propositions and terms, every one of which is a 
negation. A friend of my own, who was much 
pressed to say how much of the Athanasian Creed he 
still accepted, once said that he clung to the *idea 



FREDERIC HARRISON". 27 

that there was a sort of a something.' In homely 
words such as the unlearned can understand, that is 
precisely what the religion of the Agnostic comes to, 
4 the belief that there is a sort of a something, about 
which we can know nothing.' 

Now let us profess that, as a philosophical answer 
to the theological problem, that is entirely our own 
position. The Positivist answer is of course the 
same as the Agnostic answer. Why, then, do we ob- 
ject to be called Agnostics ? Simply because Agnos- 
tic is only dog-Greek for 4 don't know,' and we have 
no taste to be called ' don't know.' The Spectator 
calls us Agnostics, but that is only by way of preju- 
dice. Our religion does not consist in a comprehen- 
sive negation ; we are not for ever replying to the 
theological problem ; we are quite unconcerned by 
the theological problem, and have something that we 
do care for, and do know. Englishmen are Europe- 
ans, and many of them are Christians, and they 
usually prefer to call themselves Englishmen, Chris- 
tians, or the like, rather than non-Asiatics or anti- 
Mahometans. Some people still prefer to call them- 
selves Protestants rather than Christians, but the taste 
is dying out, except amongst Irish Orangemen, and 
even the Nonconformist newspaper has been induced 
by Mr. Matthew Arnold to drop its famous motto : 
4 The dissiclence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of 
the Protestant religion,' For a man to s?ij that his 
religion is Agnosticism is simply the sceptical equi- 
valent of saying that his religion is Protestantism. 
Both mean that his religion is to deny and to differ. 



28 THE GHOST OF EELIGION. 

But this is not religion. The business of religion is 
to affirm and to unite, and nothing can be religion 
but that which at once affirms truth and unites men. 
The purpose of the present paper is to show that 
Agnosticism, though a valid and final answer to the 
theological or on tological problem — 'What is the 
ultimate cause of the world and of man ? ' — is not a 
religion nor the shadow of a religion. It offers none 
of the rudiments or elements of religion, and religion 
is not to be found in that line at all. It is the mere 
disembodied spirit of dead religion : as we said at the 
outset, it is the ghost of religion. Agnosticism, per- 
fectly legitimate as the true answer of science to an 
effete question, has shown us that religion is not to 
be found anywhere within the realm of Cause. Hav- 
ing brought us to the answer, 4 no cause that we 
know of,' it is laughable to call that negation religion. 
Mr. Mark Pattison, one of the acutest minds of 
modern Oxford, rather oddly says that the idea of 
deity has now been 'defecated to a pure transparency.' 
The evolution philosophy goes a step further and 
defecates the idea of cause to a pure transparency. 
Theology and ontology alike end in the Everlasting 
No with which science confronts all their assertions. 
But how whimsical is it to tell us that religion, which 
cannot find any resting-place in theology or ontology, 
is to find its true home in the Everlasting No ! That 
which is defecated to a pure transparency can never 
supply a religion to any human being but a philoso- 
pher constructing a system. It is quite conceivable 
that religion is to end with theology, and both might 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 29 

in the course of evolution become an anachronism. 
But if religion there is still to be, it cannot be found 
in this No-man's-land and Know-nothing creed. 
Better bury religion at once than let its ghost walk 
uneasy in our dreams. 

The true lesson is that we must hark back, and 
leave the realm of Cause. The accident of religion 
has been mistaken for the essence of religion. The 
essence of religion is not to answer a question, but to 
govern and unite men and societies by giving them 
common beliefs and duties. Theologies tried to do 
this, and long did it, by resting on certain answers to 
certain questions. The progress of thought has upset 
one answer after another, and now the final verdict 
of philosophy is that all the answers are unmeaning, 
and that no rational answer can be given. It follows 
then that questions and answers, both but the accident 
of religion, must both be given up. A base of belief 
and duty must be looked for elsewhere, and when 
this has been found, then again religion will succeed 
in governing and uniting men. Where is this base 
to be found ? Since the realm of Cause has failed to 
give us foothold, we must fall back upon the realm 
of Law — social, moral, and mental, and not merely 
physical. Religion consists, not in answering certain 
questions, but in making men of a certain quality. 
And the law, moral, mental, social, is pre-eminently 
the field wherein men may be governed and united. 
Hence to the religion of Cause there succeeds the 
religion of Law. But the religion of Law or Science 
is Positivism. 



30 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

It is no part of my purpose to criticise Mr. Spen- 
cer's memorable essay, except so far as it is necessary 
to show that that which is a sound philosophical con- 
clusion is not religion, simply by reason that it re- 
lates to the subject-matter of theology. But a few 
words may be suffered as to the historical evolution 
of religion. To many persons it will sound rather 
whimsical, and possibly almost a sneer, to trace the 
germs of religion to the ghost-theory. Our friends of 
the Psychical Research will prick up their ears, and 
expect to be taken au grand serieux. But the con- 
ception is a thoroughly solid one, and of most sug- 
gestive kind. Beyond all doubt, the hypothesis of 
quasi-human immaterial spirits working within and 
behind familiar phenomena did take its rise from the 
idea of the other self which the imagination contin- 
ually presents to the early reflections of man. 

And, beyond all doubt, the phenomena of dreams, 
and the gradual construction of a theory of ghosts, 
is a very impressive and vivid form of the notion of 
the other self. It would, I think, be wrong to assert 
that it is the only form of the notion, and one can 
hardly suppose that Mr. Spencer would limit himself 
to that. But, in any case, the construction of a cohe- 
rent theory of ghosts is a typical instance of a belief 
in a quasi-human spirit-world. Glorify and amplify 
this idea, and apply it to the whole of nature, and we 
get a god-world, a multitude of superhuman divine 
spirits. 

That is the philosophical explanation of the rise of 
theology, of the peopling of Nature with divine spir- 



FEEDEEIC HAEEISON. 31 

its. But does it explain the rise of Religion ? No, 
for theology and religion are not conterminous. Mr. 
Spencer has unwittingly conceded to the divines that 
which they assume so confidently — that theology is 
the same thing as religion, and that there was no 
religion at all until there was a belief in superhuman 
spirits within and behind Nature. This is obviously 
an oversight. We have to go very much further 
back for the genesis of religion. There were count- 
less centuries of time, and there were, and there are, 
countless millions of men for whom no doctrine of 
superhuman spirits ever took coherent form. In all 
these ages and races, probably by far the most nu- 
merous that our planet has witnessed, there was 
religion in all kinds of definite form. Comte calls it 
Fetichism — terms are not important: roughly, we 
may call it Nature-worship. The religion in all these 
types was the belief and worship not of spirits of any 
kind, not of any immaterial, imagined being inside 
things, but of the actual visible things themselves 
— trees, stones, rivers, mountains, earth, fire, stars, 
sun, and sky. Some of the most abiding and power- 
ful of all religions have consisted in elaborate worship 
of these physical objects treated frankly as physical 
objects, without trace of ghost, spirit, or god. To 
say nothing of fire-worship, river, and tree-worship, 
the venerable religion of China, far the most vast of 
all systematic religions, is wholly based on reverence 
for Earth, Sky, and Ancestors treated objectively, and 
not as the abode of subjective immaterial spirits. 
Hence the origin of religion is to be sought in the 



32 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

countless ages before the rise of theology; before 
spirits, ghosts, or gods ever took definite form in the 
human mind. The primitive uncultured man frankly 
worshipped external objects in love and in fear, ascrib- 
ing to them quasi-human powers and feelings. All 
that we read about Animism, ghosts, spirits, and uni- 
versal ideas of godhead in this truly primitive stage 
are metaphysical assumptions of men trying to read 
the ideas of later epochs into the facts of an earlier 
epoch. Nothing is more certain than that man 
everywhere started with a simple worship of natural 
objects. And the bearing of this on the future of 
religion is decisive. The religion of man in the 
vast cycles of primitive ages was reverence for Na- 
ture as influencing Man. The religion of man in the 
vast cycles that are to come will be the reverence for 
Humanity as supported by Nature. The religion of 
man in the twenty or thirty centuries of Theology 
was reverence for the assumed authors or controllers 
of Nature. But, that assumption having broken up, 
religion does not break up with it. On the contrary, 
it enters on a far greater and more potent career, 
inasmuch as the natural emotions of the human heart 
are now combined with the certainty of scientific 
knowledge. The final religion of enlightened man 
is the systematized and scientific form of the spon- 
taneous religion of natural man. Both rest on the 
same elements — belief in the Power which controls 
his life, and grateful reverence for the Power so ac- 
knowledged. The primitive man thought that Power 
to be the object of Nature affecting Man. The cul- 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 33 

tnrecl man knows that Power to be Humanity itself, 
controlling and controlled by nature according to 
natural law. The transitional and perpetually chang- 
ing creed of Theology has been an interlude. Ag- 
nosticism has uttered its epilogue. But Agnosticism 
is no more religion than differentiation or the nebular 
hypothesis is religion. 

We have only to see what are the elements and 
ends of religion to recognize that we cannot find it 
in the negative and the unknown. In any reasonable 
use of language religion implies some kind of belief 
in a Power outside ourselves, some kind of awe 
and gratitude felt for that Power, some kind of 
influence exerted by it over our lives. There are 
always in some sort these three elements — belief, 
worship, conduct. A religion which gives us nothing 
in particular to believe, nothing as an object of awe 
and gratitude, which has no special relation to human 
duty, is not a religion at all. It may be formula, a 
generalization, a logical postulate ; but it is not a 
religion. The universal presence of the unknowable 
(or rather of the unknown) sub-stratum is not a relig- 
ion. It is a logical postulate. You may call it, if you 
please, the first axiom of science, a law of the human 
mind, or perhaps better the universal postulate of 
philosophy. But try it by every test which indicates 
religion and you will find it wanting. 

The points which the Unknowable has in common 
with the object of any religion are very slight and 
superficial. As the universal substratum it has some 
analogy with other superhuman objects of worship. 



34 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

But Force, Gravitation, Atom, Undulation, Vibra- 
tion, and other abstract notions have much the same 
kind of analogy, but nobody ever dreamed of a relig- 
ion of gravitation, or the worship of molecules. The 
Unknowable has managed to get itself spelt with a 
capital U ; but Carlyle taught us to spell the Ever- 
lasting No with capitals also. The Unknowable is 
no doubt mysterious, and Godhead is mysterious. It 
certainly appeals to the sense of wonder, and the 
Trinity appeals to the sense of wonder. It suggests 
vague and infinite extension, as does the idea of 
deity : but then Time and Space equally suggest 
vague and infinite extension. Yet no one but a 
delirious Kantist ever confessed that Time and Space 
were his religion. These seem all the qualities which 
the Unknowable has in common with objects of wor- 
ship — ubiquity, mystery, and immensity. But these 
qualities it shares with some other postulates of 
thought. . 

But try it by all the other recognized tests of relig- 
ion. Religion is not made up of wonder, or of a 
vague sense of immensity, unsatisfied yearning after 
infinity. Theology, seeking a refuge in the unintelli- 
gible, has no doubt accustomed this generation to 
imagine that a yearning after infinity is the sum and 
substance of religion. But that is a metaphysical 
disease of the age. And there is no reason that phi- 
losophers should accept this hysterical piece of trans- 
cendentalism, and assume that they have found the 
field of religion when they have found a field for 
unquenchable yearning after infinity. Wonder has 



FKEDERIC HARBISON. 35 

its place in religion, and so has mystery ; but it is a 
subordinate place. The roots and fibres of religion 
are to be found in love, awe, sympathy, gratitude, 
consciousness of inferiority and of dependence, com- 
munity of will, acceptance of control, manifestation 
of purpose, reverence for majesty, goodness, creative 
energy, and life. Where these things are not, relig- 
ion is not. 

Let us take each one of these three elements of relig- 
ion — belief, worship, conduct, and try them all in 
turn as applicable to the Unknowable. How mere a 
phrase must any religion be of which neither belief, 
nor worship, nor conduct can be spoken ! Imagine a 
religion which can have no believers, because, ex 
hypothesis its adepts are forbidden to believe any- 
thing about it. Imagine a religion which excludes 
the idea of worship, because its sole-dogma is the in- 
finity of Nothingness. Although the Unknowable is 
logically said to be Something, yet the something of 
which we neither know nor conceive anything is 
practically nothing. Lastly, imagine a religion which 
can have no relation to conduct; for obviously.. the 
Unknowable can give us no intelligible help to con- 
duct, and ex vi termini can have no bearing on con- 
duct. A religion which could not make any one any 
better; which would leave the human heart and 
human society just as it found them; which left no 
foothold for devotion, and none for faith ; which 
could have no creed, no doctrines, no temples, no 
priests, no teachers, no rites, no morality, no beauty, 
no hope, no consolation ; which is summed up in one 



36 THE GHOST OF RELIGION". 

dogma — the Unknowable is everywhere, and evolu- 
tion is its prophet — this is indeed 'to defecate relig- 
ion to a pure transparency.' 

The growing weakness of religion has long been 
that it is being thrust inch by inch off the platform 
of knowledge ; and we watch with sympathy the 
desperate efforts of all religious spirits to maintain 
the relations between knowledge and religion. And 
now it hears the invitation of Evolution to abandon 
the domain of knowledge, and to migrate to the do- 
main of no-knowledge. The true Rock of Ages, says 
the philosopher, is the Unknowable. To the eye of 
Faith all things are henceforth djmr«^/«, as Cicero 
calls it. The paradox would hardly be greater if we 
were told that true religion consisted in unlimited 
Vice. 

What is religion for ? Why do we want it ? And 
what do we expect it to do for us ? If it can give us 
no sure ground for our minds to rest on, nothing to 
purify the heart, to exalt the sense of sympathy, to 
deepen our sense of beauty, to strengthen our resolves, 
to chasten us into resignation and to kindle a spirit 
of self-sacrifice — what is the good of it ? The Un- 
knowable, ex hypothesis can do none of these things. 
The object of all religion, in any known variety of 
religion, has invariably had some quasi-human and 
sympathetic relation to man and human life. It 
follows from the very meaning of religion that it 
could not effect any of its work without such quality 
or relation. It would be hardly sane to make a relig- 
ion out of the Equator or the Binomial theorem. 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 37 

Whether it was the religion of the lowest savage, of 
the Polytheist, or of the Hegelian Theist ; whether 
the object of the worship were a river, the Moon, the 
Sky, Apollo, Thor, God, or First Cause, there has al- 
ways been some chain of sympathy — influence on 
the one side, and veneration on the other. However 
rudimentary, there must be a belief in some power 
influencing the believer, and whose influence, he 
repays with awe and gratitude and a desire to con- 
form his life thereto. But to make a religion out of 
the Unknowable is far more extravagant than to 
make it out of the Equator. We know something of 
the Equator; it influences seamen, equatorial peo- 
ples, and geographers not a little, and we all hesitate, 
as a\ as o-ice said, to speak disrespectfully of the Equa- 
tor. But would it be blasphemy to speak disrespect- 
fully of the Unknowable ? Our minds are a blank 
about it. As to acknowledging the Unknowable, or 
trusting in it, or feeling its influence over us, or pay- 
ing gratitude to it, or conforming our lives to it, or 
looking to it for help — the use of such words about 
it is unmeaning. We can wonder at it, as the child 
wonders at the 6 twinkling star,' and that is all. It is 
a religion only to stare at. 

Religion is not a thing of star-gazing and staring, 
but of life and action. And the condition of any such 
effect on our lives and our hearts is some sort of 
vital quality in that which is the object of the relig- 
ion. The mountain, sun, or sky which untutored 
man worships is thought to have some sort of vital 
qualhVy, some potency of the kind possessed by 



38 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

organic beings. When mountain, sun, and sky cease 
to have this vital potency, educated man ceases to 
worship them. Of course all sorts and conditions of 
divine spirits are assumed in a pre-eminent degree to 
have this quality, and hence the tremendous force 
exerted by all religions of divine spirits. Philosophy 
and the euthanasia of theology have certainly re- 
duced this vital quality to a minimum in our day, 
and I suppose Dean Mansel's Bampton Lectures 
touched the low-water mark of vitality as predicated 
of the Divine Being. Of all modern theologians, the 
Dean came the nearest to the Evolution negation. 
But there is a gulf which separates even his all-nega- 
tive deity from Mr. Spencer's impersonal, unconsci- 
ous, unthinking, and unthinkable Energy. 

Knowledge is of course wholly within the sphere 
of the Known. Our moral and social science is, of 
course, within the sphere of knowledge. Moral and 
social well-being, moral and social education, progress, 
perfection naturally rest on moral and social science. 
Civilization rests on moral and social progress. And 
happiness can only be secured by both. But if relig- 
ion has its sphere in the Unknown and Unknowable, 
it is thereby outside all this field of the Known. In 
other words Religion (of the Unknowable type) is 
ex hypothesi outside the sphere of knowledge, of 
civilization, of social discipline, of morality, of pro- 
gress, and of happiness. It has no part or parcel in 
human life. It fills a brief and mysterious chapter in 
a system of philosophy. 

By their fruits you shall know them is true of all 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 39 

sorts of religion. And what are the fruits of the 
Unknowable but the Dead Sea apples. Obviously it 
can teach us nothing', influence us in nothing, for the 
absolutely incalculable and unintelligible can give us 
neither ground for action nor thought. Nor can it 
touch any one of our feelings but that of wonder, 
mystery, and sense of human helplessness. Helpless, 
objectless, apathetic wonder at an inscrutable infinity 
may be attractive to a metaphysical divine ; but it 
does not sound like a working force in the world. 
Does the Evolutionist commune with the Unknow- 
able in the secret silence of his chamber ? Does he 
meditate on it, saying, in quietness and confidence 
shall be your strength ? One would like to see the 
new Imitatio Ignoti. It was said of old, Ignotum 
omne pro magnifico. But the new version is to be 
Ignotum omne pro divino. 

One would like to know how much of the Evolu- 
tionist's day is consecrated to seeking the Unknow- 
able in a devout way, and what the religious exer- 
cises might be. How does the man of science ap- 
proach the All-Nothingness? and the microscopist, 
and the embryologist, and the vivisectionist ? What 
do they learn about it, what strength or comfort does 
it give them? Nothing — nothing: it is an ever- 
present conundrum to be everlastingly given up, and 
perpetually to be asked of one's self and one's neigh- 
bors, but without waiting for the answer. Tantalus 
and Sisyphus bore their insoluble tasks, and the Evolu- 
tionist carries about his riddle without an answer, his 
unquenchable thirst to know that which he only 



40 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

knows he can never know. Quisque suos patimur 
Manes. But Tantalus and Sisyphus called it Hell 
and the retribution of the Gods. The Evolutionist 
calls it Religion, and one might almost say Paradise, 

A child comes up to our Evolutionist friend, looks 
up in his wise and meditative face, and says, c Oh ! 
wise and great Master, what is religion ? ' And he 
tells that child, ' It is the presence of the Unknow- 
able.' 'But what,' asks the child, 'am I to believe 
about it ? ' ' Believe that you can never know any- 
thing about it.' * But how am I to learn to do my 
duty ? ' ' Oh ! for duty you must turn to the known, 
to moral and social science.' And a mother wrung 
with agony for the loss of her child, or the wife 
crushed by the death of her children's father, or the 
helpless and the oppressed, the poor and the needy, 
men, women, and children, in sorrow, doubt, and 
want, longing for something to comfort them and to 
guide them, something to believe in, to hope for, to 
love, and to worship — they come to our philosopher 
and they say, ' You men of science have routed our 
priests, and have silenced our old teachers. What 
religious faith do you give us in its place ? ' And 
the philosopher replies (his full heart bleeding for 
them) and he says , ' Think on the Unknowable.' 

And in the hour of pain, danger, or death, can any 
one think of the Unknowable, hope anything of the 
Unknowable, or find any consolation therein ? Altars 
might be built to some Unknown God, conceived as 
a real being, knowing us, though not known by us 
yet. But altars to the unknowable infinity, even 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 41 

metaphorical altars, are impossible, for this unknown 
can never be known, and we have not the smallest 
reason to imagine that it either knew us, or affects 
us, or anybody, or anything. As the Unknowable can- 
not bring men together in a common belief, or for com- 
mon purposes, or kindred feeling, it can no more unite 
men than the precession of the equinoxes can unite 
them. So there can never be congregations of Un- 
knowable worshippers, nor churches dedicated to the 
Holy Unknowable, nor images nor symbols of the Un- 
knowable mystery. Yes ! there is one symbol of the 
Infinite Unknowable, and it is perhaps the most defi- 
nite and ultimate word that can be said about it. 
The precise and yet inexhaustible language of math- 
ematics enables us to express in a common algebraic 
formula, the exact combination of the unknown raised 
to its highest power of infinity. That formula is (x n ), 
and here we have the beginning and perhaps the end 
of a symbolism for the religion of the Infinite Unknow- 
able. Schools, academies, temples of the Unknow- 
able, there cannot be. But where two or three are 
gathered together to worship the Unknowable, there 
the algebraic formula may suffice to give form to 
their emotions : they may be heard to profess their 
unwearying belief in (V*), even if no weak brother 
with ritualist tendencies be heard to cry, 'Of, love 
us, help us, make us one with thee ! ' 

These things have their serious side, and suggest 
the real difficulties in the way of the theory. The 
alternative is this : Is religion a mode of answering a 
question in ontology, or is it an institution for affect- 







_- -- 



ri-.zzzi.:: Z..L.7,?.:.- : ^ r . -A 

:::.::::::"• :t_t:'--'. . _t r ". •. '.r> v ^ "'.".. Al . :._..- _::.,: _--: :_-r 

□ _ 

1 3 % amd widMlramiiaig si every - I 

:.::.:. 7 : - z~ . '. . t j. i ..:..' r : ~ r : : . > ti - ; , - - t i \ te t i: : n 

:~r: :~t A:-:: :-.::.:•: ri :„r j.Ail.: : :' :eAA ::. :■.:... :ii 
■■ ~- - : " Z ... z - : : - - 1 - - - - : ; __.- 

tiiiLMMBg tSae e©mfesfc ©m tin© ©peim fcM off tlhe Ikx : . 
ijfaat they iaa©i© amdL matt : - sedk k w :itar t© tihe 
:•".;- A— ::"..;. :: :L-e t:::.-:::^::;^. T1t~ ire ><: Ler- 
ribly afeaM ©f am aMlfc©p©aBB©irpll3iie G©dL ti : I* 
iii~e ^""i" -iziiTc i :lt: :. :_. tt:. i . : : ; : _ -r ; T --::: 

— * defocafe J. tine I((E©a t© a puM© : . ... e 

: : t_.t —. . c . r _ -i- ._. e :. t :: ._:.t../_ ~ _".> it. _ ei.~ _■_ :_-t- 
if St . " .- . : . ----- : "r - . : e : : ~ .- . 
Ani ~:~ ::t~ i:e ::\:s_r! : ~ : ~ E~:l~7i:~ _:_:: :_t 
abyss, amid ame sofaniumJly assflnrod tSnaifc tlhe : e :::.:. • 
t.:~ :z Zui'Zr.'.- i-i *v:A:i:-e is :Z:;::.. ~ ."_..> relig- 
:::: : : :le V :. kz. . ~~ ;. ie — :....- " a : biimmm m 

WM&m. Thfir LoiSmtes aiad itelir Im^oMpneLT : . - . 
"iifir A": - : A.e :.:. ". ::.e"_: Vl : : :. iir: : - ... Live A :"__.: 
tHaerat t© tMs. It is ©nly ©me i i - j.'jwsl "t2a© sua! ... 
:■: ::.e ::.z:. :~A le. 

Piaetically, s© far as It afFe : : ; '.'. e Hi " t b aff M»eia anadl 
"^ : ZZ.-Z. in ::.t ': .,::-t : : lift-., ii-e A" - : A r-f :.~l i V:. : :- 
diti©med. Gnoxiiliead. ©f l^im©d diwiicir- fa -_ 
::.f 5.;.--;.t :A.:.r ."•- ::.t A :-:/.:.: r _ :..^::. : ~...": .r _ : .:. 
iiaaj ixmz a ". rieiam Ibj \asjMurer 

j©a. eamm.©^ dtaedk Tiiee, lEiinaae, ani'd it^: 
::-.v::. '.:" n'.r::. m.i ~ ::i".f :. i:. i. ."_::. 7f.j : i Tru'i - 1 -:..:. 
tlf >f: •;: ZZ i_:.ir::- :Lr.-_;" is :/~ 7 ^' : ' i: . _ :._r ...i- 



44 THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 

thropomorphic and into the Absolute. In trying to 
save a religion of the spirit-world, theologians are 
abandoning all religion of the real world ; they are 
turning religion into formulas and phrases, and are 
taking out of it all power over life, duty, and society. 

I say, in a word, unless religion is to be anthropo- 
morphic, there can be no working religion at all. 
How strange is this new cry, sprung up in our own 
generation, that religion is dishonored by being an- 
thropomorphic ! Fetichism, Polytheism, Confucian- 
ism, Mediaeval Christianity, and Bible Puritanism 
have all been intensely anthropomorphic, and all owe 
their strength and dominion to that fact. You can 
have no religion without kinship, sympathy, relation 
of some human kind between the believer, worshipper, 
servant, and the object of his belief, veneration, and 
service. The Neo-Theisms have all the same moral 
weakness that the Unknowable has. They offer no 
kinship, sympathy, or relation whatever between wor- 
shipper and worshipped. They too are logical form- 
ulas begotten in controversy, dwelling apart from 
man and the world. If the formula of the Unknowa- 
ble is (V 1 ) or the Unknown raised to infinity, theirs 
is (nx), some unknown expression of Infinity. Neither 
(x n ) nor (nx) will ever make good men and women. 

If we leave the region of formulas, and go back to 
the practical effect of religion on human conduct, we 
must be driven to the conclusion that the future of 
religion is to be, not only what every real religion 
has ever been, anthropomorphic — but frankly an- 
thropic. The attempted religion of Spiritism has lost 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 45 

one after another every resource of a real religion, 
until risu solvitntur tabulce, and it ends in a religion 
of Nothingism. It is the Nemesis of Faith in spirit- 
ual abstractions and figments. The hypothesis has 
burst, and leaves the Void. The future will have 
then to return to the Knowable and the certainly 
known, to the religion of Realism. It must give up 
explaining the Universe, and content itself with ex- 
plaining human life. Humanity is the grandest object 
of reverence within the region of the real and the 
known, Humanity with the World on which it rests 
as its base and environment. Religion, having failed 
in the superhuman world, returns to the human 
world. Here religion can find again all its certainty, 
all its depth of human sympathy, all its claim to com- 
mand and reward the purest self-sacrifice and love. 
We can take our place again with all the great relig- 
ious spirits who have ever moulded the faith and life 
of men, and we find ourselves in harmony with the 
devout of every faith who are manfully battling with 
sin and discord. The way for us is the clearer as we 
find the religion of Spiritism, in its long and restless 
evolution of thirty centuries, ending in the legitimate 
deduction, the religion of the Unknowable, a paradox 
as memorable as any in the history of the human 
mind. The alternative is very plain. Shall we cling 
to a religion of Spiritism when philosophy is whittling 
away spirit to Nothing? Or shall we accept a relig- 
ion of Realism, where all the great traditions and 
functions of religion are retained unbroken ? 

Frederic Harrison. 



RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 1 

In days when duelling was common, and its code of 
ceremonial well elaborated, a deadly encounter was 
preceded by a polite salute. Having by his obeisance 
professed to be his antagonist's very humble servant, 
each forthwith did his best to run him through the 
body. 

1 Excepting its last section, this article had been written, and 
part of it sent to the printers, by the 30th of May : and, conse- 
quently, before I saw the article of Sir James Stephen, published in 
the last number of this Review. Hence the fact that only in its 
last section have I been able (without undue interruption of my ar- 
gument) to refer to points in Sir James Stephen's criticism. 

Concerning his criticism generally, I may remark that it shows 
me how dangerous it is to present separately, in brief space, conclu- 
sions which it has taken a large space to justify. Unhappily, 
twelve pages do not suffice for adequate exposition of a system of 
thought, or even of its bases ; and misapprehension is pretty cer- 
tain to occur if a statement contained in twelve pages is regarded 
as. more than a rude outline. If Sir James Stephen will refer to 
§§49-207 of the Principles of Sociology, occupying 350 pages, I 
fancy that instead of seeming to him ' weak,' the evidence there 
given of the origin of religious ideas will seem to him very strong ; 
and I venture also to think that if he will refer to Firxt Principles 
§§ 24-26, § 50, §§ 58-61, § 194, and to the PrinciiAes of Pyschology 
§§ 347-351, he may find that what he thinks ' an unmeaning playing 
with words,' has more meaning than appears at first sight. 

46 



HERBERT SPENCER. 47 

This usage is recalled to me by the contrast be- 
tween the compliments with which Mr. Harrison 
begins his article, 'The Ghost of Religion,' and the 
efforts he afterwards makes to destroy, in the bril- 
liant style habitual with him, all but the negative 
part of that which he applauds. After speaking 
with too flattering eulogy of the mode in which I 
have dealt with current theological doctrines, he does 
his best, amid flashes of wit coming from its polished 
surface, to pass the sword of his logic through the 
ribs of my argument, and let out its vital principle — ■ 
that element in it which is derived from the religious 
ideas and sentiments that have grown up along with 
human evolution, but which is inconsistent with the 
creed Mr. Harrison preaches. 

So misleading was the professed agreement with 
which he commenced his article, that, as I read on, I 
was some time in awakening to the fact that I had 
before me not a friend, but, controversially speaking, 
a determined enemy, who was seeking to reduce, as 
he would say to a ghostly form, that surviving ele- 
ment of religion which, as I had contended, Agnosti- 
cism contains. Even when this dawned on me, the 
suavity of Mr. Harrison's first manner continued so 
influential that I entertained no thought of defending 
myself. It was only after perceiving that what he 
modestly calls 4 a rider,' was described by one journal 
as ' a criticism keen, trenchant, destructive,' while by 
some other journals kindred estimates of it were 
formed, that I decided to make a reply as soon as 
pending engagements allowed. 



48 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

Recognizing, then, the substance of Mr. Harrison's 
article as being an unsparing assault on the essential 
part of that doctrine which I have set forth, I shall 
here not scruple to defend it in the most effective 
way I can ; not allowing the laudation with which 
Mr. Harrison prefaces his ridicule, to negative such 
xejoinders, incisive as I can make them, as will best 
serve my purpose. 

A critic who, in a recent number of the Edinburgh 
Review, tells the world in very plain language what 
he thinks about a book of mine, and who has been 
taken to task by the editor of Knowledge for his in- 
justice, refers to Mr, Harrison (whom he describes in 
a felicitous phrase as looking at me from ' a very op- 
posite pole') as being, on one point, in agreement 
with him. 1 But for this reference it would not have 
occurred to me to associate in thought Mr. Harrison's 
criticisms with those of the Edinburgh Reviewer; but 
now that comparison is suggested, I am struck by the 
fact that Mr. Harrison's representations of my yiews 
diverge from the realities no less widely than those 
of a critic whose antagonism is unqualified, and whose 
animus is displayed in his first paragraph. 

So anxious is Mr. Harrison to show that the doc- 
trine he would discredit has no kinship to the doc- 
trines called religious, that he will not allow me, 
without protest, to use the language needed for con- 
veying my meaning. The expression 'an Infinite 
and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed,' 
1 Knowledge, March, 14, 18S4. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 49 

he objects to as being ' perhaps a rather equivocal re- 
version to the theologic type ; ' and he says this be- 
cause ' in the Athanasian Creed the Third Person 
"proceeds" from the First and the Second.' It is 
hard that I should be debarred from thus using the 
word by this preceding use. Perhaps Mr. Harrison 
will be surprised to learn that, as originally written, 
the expression ran — 4 an Infinite and Eternal Energy 
by which all things are created and sustained ; ' and 
that in the proof I struck out the last clause because, 
though the words did not express more than I meant, 
the ideas associated with them might mislead, and 
there might result such an insinuation as that which 
Mr. Harrison makes. The substituted expression, 
which embodies my thought in the most colorless 
way, I cannot relinquish because he does not like it 
— or rather, indeed, because he does not like the 
thought itself. It is not convenient to him that the 
Unknowable, which he repeatedly speaks of as a pure 
negation, should be represented as that through which 
all things exist. And, indeed, it would greatly em- 
barrass him to recognize this ; since the recognition 
would prevent him from asserting that ' none of the 
positive attributes whicli have ever been predicated 
of God can be used of this Energy.' 

Not only does he, as in the last sentence, nega- 
tively misdescribe the character of this Energy, but 
he positively misdescribes it. He says — 'It remains 
always Energy, Force : nothing anthropomorphic ; 
such as- electricity, or anything else that we might 
conceive as the ultimate basis of all the physical 



50 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

forces.' Now, on page 17 of the essay Mr. Harrison 
criticises, there occurs the sentence — 4 The final out- 
come of that speculation commenced by the primitive 
man, is that the Power manifested throughout the 
Universe distinguished as material, is the same power 
which in ourselves wells up under the form of con- 
sciousness ; ' and on page 19 it is said that 4 this ne- 
cessity we are under to think of the external energy 
in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spirit- 
ualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe.' 
Does he really think that the meaning of these sen- 
tences is conveyed by comparing the ultimate energy 
to ' electricity ' ? And does he think this in face of 
the statement on page 19 that ' phenomenal manifesta- 
tions of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us 
what it is'? Surely that which is described as the 
substratum at once of material and mental existence, 
bears towards us and towards the Universe a rela- 
tion utterly unlike that which electricity bears to the 
other physical forces. 

Persistent thinking along defined grooves, causes 
inability to get out of them ; and Mr. Harrison, in 
more than one way, illustrates this. So completely 
is his thought moulded to that form of phenomenal- 
ism entertained by M. Comte, that, in spite of re- 
peated denials of it, he ascribes it to me ; and does 
tli is in face of the various presentations of an opposed 
phenomenalism, which I have given in the article he 
criticises and elsewhere. Speaking after his lively 
manner of the Unknown Cause as an 4 ever present 
conundrum to be everlastingly given up,' he asks — 



HERBERT SPENCER. 51 

1 How does the man of science approach the All- 
Nothingness?' Now, M. Comte describes Positivism 
as becoming perfect when it reaches the power c se 
representer tons les divers phenomenes observables 
comme des cas particnliers cl'un seul fait general 
... en considerant comme absolnment inaccessible 
et vide de sens ponr nons la recherche de ce qn'on 
appelle les causes, soit premieres, soit finales ; ' * and 
in pursuance of this view, the Comtean system limits 
itself to phenomena, and deliberately ignores the ex- 
istence of anything implied by the phenomena. But 
though M. Comte thus exhibits to us a doctrine 
which, performing ' the happy despatch,' eviscerates 
things and leaves a shell of appearances with no real- 
ity inside ; yet I have in more than one place, and in 
the most emphatic way, declined thus to commit in- 
tellectual suicide. So far from regarding that which 
transcends phenomena as the ' All-Nothingness,' I re- 
gard it as the All-Being. Everywhere I have spoken 
the Unknowable as the Ultimate Reality — the sole 
existence : all things present to consciousness being 
but shows of it. Mr. Harrison entirely inverts our 
relative positions. As I understand the case, the 
4 All-Nothingness ' is that phenomenal existence in 
which M. Comte* and his disciples profess to dwell — 
profess, I say, because in their ordinary thoughts 
they recognize an existence transcending phenomena, 
just as much as other people recognize it. 

That the opposition between the view actually 
held by me and the view ascribed to me by Mr. Har 
1 Systeme de Philosophie Positive, vol. i. pp. 5 and 14. 



52 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

rison, is absolute, will be most clearly seen on ob- 
serving the contrast he draws between my view and 
the view of the late Dean Mansel. He says : — 

Of all modern theologians, the Dean came the nearest to the 
Evolution negation. But there is a gulf which separates even his 
all-negative deity from Mr. Spencer's impersonal, unconscious, 
unthinking, and unthinkable Energy. 

It is quite true that there exists this gulf. But then 
the propositions forming the two sides of the gulf are 
the opposites of those which Mr. Harrison represents. 
For whereas, in common with his teacher Sir William 
Hamilton, Dean Mansel alleged that our conscious- 
ness of the Absolute is merely ' a negation of conceiv- 
ability : ' I have, over a space of ten pages, 1 con- 
tended that our consciousness of the Absolute is not 
negative but positive, and is the one indestructible 
element of consciousness ' which persists at all times, 
under all circumstances, and cannot cease until con- 
sciousness ceases ' — have argued that while the Power 
which transcends phenomena cannot be brought with- 
in the forms of our finite thought, yet that, as being 
a necessary datum of every thought, belief in its ex- 
istence has, among our beliefs, the highest validity of 
any : is not, as Sir W. Hamilton alleges, a belief with 
which we are supernaturally ' inspired,' but is a nor- 
mal deliverance of consciousness. Thus, as repre- 
sented by Mr. Harrison, Dean Hansel's views and 
my own are exactly transposed. Misrepresentation 
could not, I think, go further. 

The conception I have everywhere expressed and 
i First Principles, § 26. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 53 

implied, of the relation between human life and the 
Ultimate Cause, if not diametrically opposed with 
like distinctness to the conception Mr. Harrison as^ 
cribes to me, is yet thus opposed in an unmistakable 
way. After suggesting that (x 11 ) would be an appro- 
priate symbol * for the religion of the infinite Un- 
knowable,' and amusing himself and his readers by 
imaginary prayers made to (V*); after making a 
subsequent elaboration of kisjeu d\esprit by suggest- 
ing that (nx) would serve for the formula of certain 
modern Theisms, he says of these : — 

The Neo-Theisms have all the same moral weakness that the 
Unknowable has. They offer no kinship, sympathy, or relation 
whatever between worshipper and worshipped. They too are 
logical formulas begotten in controversy, dwelling apart from man 
and the world. 

Now, considering that in the article he had before 
him, there is in various ways implied the view that 
' the power which manifests itself in consciousness is 
but a differently conditioned form of the power which 
manifests itself beyond consciousness — considering 
that there, as everywhere throughout my books, the 
implication is that our lives, alike physical and men- 
tal, in common with all the activities, organic and 
inorganic, amid which we live, are but the workings 
of this Power, it is not a little astonishing to find it 
described as simply a 'logical formula begotten in 
controversy.' Does Mr. Harrison really think that 
he represents the facts when he describes as c dwell- 
ing apart from man and the world,' that Power of 
which man and the world are regarded products, and 



54 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

which is manifested through man and the world from 
instant to instant? 

Did I not need the space for other topics, I might 
at much greater length contrast Mr. Harrison's 
erroneous versions with the true ones. I might 
enlarge on the fact that, though the name Agnos- 
ticism fitly expresses the confessed inability to know 
or conceive the nature of the Power manifested 
through phenomena, it fails to indicate the confessed 
ability to recognize the existence of that Power as of 
all things the most certain. I might make clear the 
contrast between that Comtean Agnosticism which 
says that ' Theology and ontology alike end in the 
Everlasting No with which science confronts all 
their assertions,' 1 and the Agnosticism set forth in 
First Principles, which, along with its denials, em- 
phatically utters an Everlasting Yes. And I might 
show in detail that Mr. Harrison is wrong in implying 
that Agnosticism, as I hold it, is anything more than 
silent with respect to the question of personality; 
since, though the attributes of personality, as we 
know it, cannot be conceived by us as attributes of 
the Unknown Cause of things, yet ' duty requires us 
neither to affirm nor deny personality,' but ' to submit 
ourselves with all humility to the established limits 
of our intelligence' in the conviction that the choice 
is not ' between personality and something lower than 
personality,' but 'between personality and something 
higher,' 2 and that the Ultimate Power is no more 

1 Harrison, Nineteenth Century for March, p. 497. [Siqwa, p. 28.] 

2 First Principles, § 31. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 55 

representable in terms of human consciousness than 
human consciousness is representable in terms of a 
plant's functions.' * 

But without further evidence, what I have said 
sufficiently proves that Mr. 'Harrison's 'criticism 
keen, trenchant, destructive,' as it was called, is 
destructive, not of an actual doctrine, but simply of 
an imaginary one. I should hardly have expected 
that Mr. Harrison, in common with the Edinburgh 
Reviewer, would have taken the course, so frequent 
with critics, of demolishing a simulacrum and walk- 
ing off in triumph as though the reality had been 
demolished. Adopting his own figure, I may say 
that he has with ease passed his weapon through and 
through ' The Ghost of Religion ; ' but then it is only 
the ghost: the reality stands unscathed. 

Before passing to the consideration of that alter- 
native doctrine which Mr. Harrison would have us 
accept, it will be well briefly to deal with certain of 
his subordinate propositions. 

After re-stating, in a succinct way, the hypothesis 
that from the conception of the ghost originated the 
conceptions of supernatural beings in general, includ- 
ing the highest, and after saying that 'one can hardly 
suppose that Mr. Spencer would limit himself to that,' 
Mr. Harrison describes what he alleges to be a prior, 
and, indeed, the primordial, form of religion. He 
says : — 

There were countless centuries of time, and there were, and 
1 Essays, vol. iii. p. 251. 



56 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION". 

there are, countless millions of men for whom no doctrine of super- 
human spirits ever took coherent form. In all these ages and races, 
probably by far the most numerous that our planet has witnessed, 
there was religion in all kinds of definite form. Comte calls it 
Fetichism — terms are not important : roughly, we may call it 
Nature-worship. The religion in all these types was the belief and 
worship not of spirits of any kind, not of any immaterial, imagined 
being inside things, but of the actual visible things themselves — 
trees, stones, rivers, mountains, earth, fire, stars, sun, and sky. 
(P. 31.) 

The attitude of discipleship is not favorable to 
inquiry ; and, as fanatical Christians show us, inquiry 
is sometimes thought sinful and likely to bring pun- 
ishment. I do not suppose that Mr. Harrison's rev- 
erence for M. Comte has gone this length ; but still 
it has gone far enough not only to cause his con- 
tinued adherence to a doctrine espoused by M. 
Comte, which has been disproved, but also to make 
him tacitly assume that this doctrine is accepted by 
one whose rejection of it was long ago set forth. In 
the Descriptive Sociology there are classified and 
tabulated statements concerning some eighty peoples; 
and besides these I have had before me masses of facts 
concerning many other peoples. An induction based 
on over a hundred examples, warrants me in saying 
that there has never existed anywhere such a religion 
as that which Mr. Harrison ascribes to 'countless 
millions of men ' during 'countless centuries of time.' 
A chapter on 4 Idol- worship and Fetich-worship ' in 
the Principles of Sociology, gives proof that in the 
absence of a developed ghost-theory, Fetichism is 
absent. I have shown that, whereas among the 
lowest races, such as the Juangs, Adamanese, Fue- 



HERBERT SPENCER. 57 

gians, Australians, Tasmanians, and Bushmen, there 
is no Fetichism ; Fetichism reaches its greatest height 
in considerably-advanced societies, like those of an- 
cient Peru and modern India : in which last place, Sir 
Alfred Lyall tells us, ' not only does the husbandman 
pray to his plough, the fisher to his net, the weaver 
to his loom ; but the scribe adores his pen, and the 
banker his account books.' 1 And I have remarked 
that, 'had Fetichism been conspicuous among the 
lowest races, and inconspicuous among the higher, 
the statement that it was primordial might have been 
held proved; but that, as the facts happen to be 
exactly the opposite, the statement is conclusively 
disproved.' 2 

Similarly with Nature-worship : regarding this as 
being partially distinguished from Fetichism by the 
relatively imposing character of its objects. In a 
subsequent chapter I have shown that this also is an 
aberrant development of ghost-worship. Among all 
the many tribes and nations, remote in place and un- 
like in type, whose superstitions I have examined, I 
have found no case in which any great natural ap- 
pearance or power, feared and propitiated, was not 
identified with a human or quasi-human personality. 
I am not aware that Professor Max Muller, or any 
adherent of his, has been able to produce a single 
case in which there exists worship of the great nat- 
ural objects themselves, pure and simple — the heav- 
ens, the sun, the moon, the dawn, etc.: objects which, 

1 'Religion of an Indian Province,' Fortnightly Review for Feb- 
ruary, 1872, p. 131. 2 Principles of Sociology, § 162. 



58 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

according to the mythologists, become personalized 
by ' a disease of language.' Personalization exists at 
the outset; and the worship is in all cases the worship 
of an indwelling ghost-derived being. 

That these conclusions are necessitated by an ex- 
haustive examination of the evidence, is shown by 
the fact that they have been forced on Dr. E. B. 
Tylor notwithstanding his original enunciation of 
other conclusions. In a lecture 4 On Traces of the 
Early Mental Condition of Man,' delivered at the Royal 
Institution on the 15th of March, 1867, he said : — 

It is well known that the lower races of mankind account for the 
facts and events of the outer world by ascribing a sort of human 
life and personality to animals, and even to plants, rocks, streams, 
winds, the sun and stars, and so on through the phenomena of na- 
ture . . '. It would probably add to the clearness of our conception 
of the state of mind which thus sees in all nature the action of an- 
imated life and the presence of innumerable spiritual beings, if we 
gave it the name of Animism instead of Fetichism. 

Here, having first noted that the conception of Fe- 
tichism derived by Dr. Tylor from multitudinous 
facts, is not like that of Mr. Harrison, who conceives 
Fetichism to be a worship of the object themselves, 
and not a worship of their indwelling spirits, we 
further note that Dr. Tylor regards this ascription of 
souls to all objects, inanimate as well as animate, 
which he proposes to call Animism rather than Fe- 
tichism, as being primordial. In the earlier part of 
his Primitive Culture, published in 1871 (as in vol. 
i. p. 431), we find a re-statement of this view ; but 
further on we observe a modification of it, as instance 
the following sentence in vol. ii. p. 100: — 



HERBERT SPENCER. 59 

It seems as though the conception of a human soul, when once 
attained to by man, served as a type or model on which he framed 
not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but also his ideas 
of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the 
long grass, up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the 
Great Spirit. 

And then, in articles published in Mind for April and 
for July, 1877, Dr. Tylor represented himself as hold- 
ing a doctrine identical with that set forth by me in 
the Principles of Sociology ; namely that the belief in a 
human ghost is original, and that the beliefs in spirits 
inhabiting inanimate objects, giving rise to Fetichism 
and Nature-worship, are derived beliefs. 

An emphatic negative is thus given to Mr. Harri- 
son's assertion that 'Nothing is more certain than 
that man everywhere started with a simple worship 
of natural objects.' And if he holds that ' the bearing 
of this on the future of religion is decisive' — if, as 
he says, ' the religion of man in the vast cycles of 
primitive ages was reverence for nature as influencing 
Man,' and if, as he infers, ' the religion of man in the 
vast cycles that are to come will be the reverence 
for Humanity as supported by Nature ' — if, as it 
thus seems, primitive religion as conceived by him is 
a basis for what he conceives to be the religion of the 
future ; then his conception of the religion of the 
future is, in so far, baseless. 

And now T come to the chief purpose ot this article 
— an examination of that alternative faith which 
Mr. Harrison has on sundry occasions set forth with 
so much eloquence. As originally designed, the 



60 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

essay, ' Religion : a Retrospect and Prospect,' was to 
include a section in which, before considering what 
the future of religion was likely to be, I proposed to 
consider what its future was not likely to be ; and 
the topic to be dealt with in this section was the so- 
called Religion of Humanity. After collecting ma- 
terials and writing ten pages, I began to perceive 
that besides being not needful for my purpose, this 
section would form too large an excrescence. A fur- 
ther feeling came into play. Though I had for many 
years looked forward to the time when an examina- 
tion of the Positivist creed would fall within the lines 
of my work, yet when I began to put on paper that 
which I had frequently thought, it seemed to me that 
I was making an uncalled-for attack on men whom I 
had every reason to admire for their high characters 
and their unwearying efforts for human welfare. 
The result was that I put aside what I had written, 
and gave up my long-cherished intention. Now, 
however, that Mr. Harrison has thrown down the 
gauntlet, I take it up, at once willingly and unwil- 
lingly — willingly in so far as acceptance of the 
challenge is concerned, unwillingly because I feel 
some reluctance in dealing hard blows at a personal 
friend. 

Surprise has been the feeling habitually produced 
in me on observing the incongruity between the as- 
tounding claims made by the propounder of this new 
creed, and the great intelligence of disciples whose 
faith appears proof against the shock which these 
astounding claims produce on ordinary minds. Those 



HERBERT SPENCER. 61 

who, from a broad view of human progress, have 
gained the general impression that ; The individual 
withers, and the world is more and more,' must be 
disinclined to believe that in the future any one in- 
dividual will impose on the world a government like 
that sought to be imposed by M. Comte ; who, unable 
to influence any considerable number of men while he 
lived, consoled himself with the thought of absolutely 
ruling all men after his death. Met, as he com- 
plained, by ' a conspiracy of silence,' he was never- 
theless confident that, very shortly becoming converts, 
mankind at large would hereafter live and move and 
have their being within his elaborated formulas. 
Papal assumption is modest compared with the as- 
sumption of ' the founder of the religion of Humanity.' 
A pope may canonize a saint or two ; but M. Comte 
undertook the canonization of all those men recorded 
in history whom he thought specially worthy of wor- 
ship. And such a canonization ! — days assigned for 
the remembrance with honor of mythical personages 
like Hercules and Orpheus, and writers such as Ter- 
ence and Juvenal ; other days on which honors, like 
in degree, are given to Kant and to Robertson, to 
Bernard de Palissy and to Schiller, to Copernicus and 
to Dollond, to Otway and to Racine, to Locke and to 
Freret, to Froissart and to Dalton, to Cyrus and to 
Penn — such a canonization ! in which these selected 
men, who are Positivist saints for ordinary days, are 
headed by greater saints for Sundays ; with the result 
that Socrates and Godfrey are thus placed on a par ; 
that while a day is dedicated to Kepler, a week is 



62 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

dedicated to Gall ; Tasso has a week assigned to Mm, 
and Goethe a day ; Mozart presides over a week; 
and a day is presided over by Beethoven ; a week is 
made sacred to Louis the Eleventh, and a day to 
Washington — such a canonization ! under which the 
greatest men, giving their names to months, are so 
selected that Frederick the Second and St. Paul alike 
bear this distinction; Gutenberg and Shakespeare 
head adjacent months ; and while Bichat gives his 
name to a month, Newton gives his name to a week! 
This, which recalls the saints' calendar of the Baby- 
lonians, among whom, as Professor Sayce shows, 
4 each day of the year had been assigned to its partic- 
ular deity or patron saint,' *■ exemplifies in but one 
way M. Comte's consuming passion for regulating 
posterity, and the colossal vanity which led him to 
believe that mankind would hereafter perform their 
daily actions as he dictated. He not only settles the 
hierarchy of saints who are above others to be wor- 
shipped, but he prescribes the forms of worship in 
minute detail. Nine sacraments are specified; prayer 
is to be made thrice a day ; for the ' daily expression 
of their emotions both in public and private ' it is 
predicted that future men will use Italian ; 2 and it 
is a recommended 'rule of worship' of the person you 
adore, that a 'precise idea of the place, next of the 
seat or the attitude, and lastly, of the dress, appro- 
priate to each particular case,' 3 should be sum- 
moned before the mind. Add to which that in the 

1 Records of the Past, vol. vii. p. 157. 3 Catechism, p. 100. 

2 System of Positive Polity, vol. iv. p. 85. 



HEEBEET SPEXCEB. 63 

elaborate rubric the sacred sign (replacing the sign 
of the cross) and derived ' from our cerebral theory ' 
(he had a phrenology of his own) consists in placing 
4 our hand in succession on the three chief organs — 
those of love, order, and- progress.' Of banners used 
in ' solemn processions,' it is directed that ' on their 
white side will be the holy image ; on their green, 
the sacred formula of Positivism ; ' and the symbol of 
our Divinity will always be a woman of the age of 
thirty, with her son in her arms.' 1 Nor was M. 
Comte's devouring desire to rule the future satisfied 
with thus elaborating the observances of his cult. 
He undertook to control the secular culture of men, 
as well as that culture which, I suppose, he distin- 
guished as sacred. There is ' a Positivist library for 
the nineteenth century,' consisting of 150 volumes ; 
the list being compiled for the purpose 'of guiding 
the more thoughtful minds.' 2 So that M. Comte's 
tastes and judgments in poetry, science, history, etc., 
are to be the standards for future generations. And 
the numerous regulations of these kinds are in addi- 
tion to the other multitudinous regulations contained 
in those parts of the highly elaborated System of Pos- 
itive Polity, in which M. Comte prescribes the social 
organization, under the arrangements of which ' the 
affective, speculative, patrician, and plebeian' classes 
are to carry on the business of their lives. 

It is, I say, not a little remarkable that a height of 
assumption exceeding that ever before displayed by 
a human being — a self-deification along with the 

1 Catechism of Positivism, pp. 142-3. 2 Ibid., p. 38. 



64 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

deification of Humanity — should not have negatived 
belief in the general doctrines set forth by him. 
One might have thought that by exhibiting a lack 
of mental balance unparalleled among sane people, 
he would have wholly discredited his speculations. 
However, recognizing the fact that this is not so, 
and assuming that M. Comte's disciples discover in 
the Religion of Humanity propounded by him, a truth 
which survives recognition of his — eccentricities, let 
us call them — we will now go on to consider this 
proposed creed. 

To those who have studied that natural genesis of 
religion summarized in the article Mr. Harrison crit- 
icises, 1 it will appear anomalous that a proposed new 
and higher religion should be, in large measure, a 
rehabilitation of the religion with which mankind 
commenced, and from which they have been insensi- 
bly diverging, until the more advanced among them 
have quite lost sight of it. After an era during 
which worship of the dead was practised all the world 
over, alike by savages and by the progenitors of the 
civilized — after an era of slow emergence from this 
primitive religion, during which the propitiation of 
ghosts completely human was replaced by the propi- 
tiation of comparatively few superhuman ghosts or 
spirits, and finally by the propitiation of a spirit 
infinitely transcending humanity, and from which 
human attributes have been gradually dropped, 
leaving only the most abstract, which are themselves 

1 And set forth at length in the Principles of Sociology, Part I. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 65 

fading ; we are told by the Positivists that there is 
coming an era in which the Universal Power men 
have come to believe in, will be ignored ; and human 
individualities, regarded now singly and now in their 
aggregate, will again be the objects of religious 
feeling. If the worship of the dead is not to be com- 
pletely resuscitated, still the proposal is to resusci- 
tate it in a form but partially transfigured. Though 
there is no direction to offer at graves food and 
drink for ghosts, yet public worship of the so-called 
'Great Being Humanity,' 'must be performed in 
the midst of the tombs of the more eminent dead, 
each tomb surrounded by a sacred grove, the scene of 
the homage paid by their family and their fellow 
citizens ; ' 1 while ' at times within each consecrated 
tomb, the priesthood will ' superintend the honoring 
of the good man or woman : 2 proposed usages analo- 
gous to those of many ancestor-worshipping peoples. 
Moreover, again taking lessons from various races of 
pagans, past and present, there is to be ' a domestic 
altar, at which, in kneeling attitude, adoration is to 
be paid to our own personal patrons, our guardian 
angels or household gods : ' 3 these being persons 
living or dead. And as exemplified by M. Comte's 
worship of Clotilde de Vaux, the praying to a 
beloved person or wife may be continued for years : 
recalling the customs of numerous peoples who 
invoked departed members of their families ; as 
instance the Balonda, among whom, if the 'spot 

1 Positive Polity, vol. iv. p. 139. 2 Catechism, p. 137. 

3 Positive Polity, vol. iv. pp. 100, 101. 



66 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

where a favorite wife has died,'. . . 'is revisited, it 
is to pray to her.' 1 

Now, omitting for the present all thought about 
the worthiness of these objects of worship, and con- 
sidering only the general nature of the system, there 
arises the question — How happens it that while in 
other respects M. Comte delineates human evolution 
as progressive, he, in this respect, delineates it as 
retrogressive? Beyond all question, civilization has 
been a gradual divergence from primitive savagerj^. 
According to his own account, the advance in social 
organization, in knowledge, in science, in art, presents 
a certain general continuity. Even in speculative 
thought, M. Comte's formula of the three stages, the 
theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, tacitly 
asserts movement in the same direction towards a 
final theory. How happens it, then, that with an 
advancing change in other things, there is to occur a 
retreating change in one thing ? — along with pro- 
gression in all else, retrogression in religion ! 

This retrogressive character of the Comtean relig- 
ion is shown in sundry other ways — being, indeed, 
sometimes distinctly admitted or avowed. Thus we 
are told that ' the domain of the priesthood must be 
reconstituted in its integrity ; medicine must again 
become a part of it,' 2 as from savage life upwards it 
was until modern times. Again, education has been 
slowly emancipating itself from ecclesiasticism; but 
in M. Comte's scheme, after the sacrament of initia- 
tion, the child passes 4 from its unsystematic training 

i Livingstone, South Africa, p. 314. 2 Catechisni, p. 50. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 67 

under the eye of its mother, to the systematic educa- 
tion given by the priesthood ; ' 1 just as, after a paral- 
lel ceremony, the child does among the Congo people, 2 
and as it did among the ancient Mexicans. 3 And 
knowingly or unknowingly, M. Comte followed the 
lead of the Egyptians, who had a formal judging of 
the dead by the living; honorable burial was allowed 
by them only in the absence of accusations against 
the deceased proved before judges ; and by M. 
Comte it is provided that after a prescribed interval, 
the priesthood shall decide whether the remains shall 
be transferred from their probationary resting-place 
to 'the sacred wood' reserved for the 'sanctified.' 
Most remarkable of all, however, is the reversion to 
an early type of religious belief in the prescribed 
worship of objects, animate and inanimate. In 
'Table A, System of Sociolatry,' there are times 
named for the 'Festival of the Animals,' 'Festi- 
val of Fire,' 'Festival of the Sun,' 'Festival of 
Iron,' etc. 

But now, passing over M. Comte's eccentricities 
and inconsistencies, let us consider on its merits the 
creed he enunciated. In addition to private worship 
of guardian angels or household gods, there is to be 
a public worship of the ' Great Being Humanity.' 
How are we to conceive this Great Being ? Various 
conceptions of it are possible; and more or less 
unlike conceptions are at one time or other presented 
to us. Let us look at them in succession. 

1 Catechism, p. 129. 2 Bastian (A.), Africanische Reisen, p. 85. 
3 Torquemada (Juan de), Monarquia Indiana, bk. ix. ch. 11-13. 



68 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

By M. Comte himself, at page 74 of the Catechism 
of Positive Religion, we are told that we must — 

define Humanity as the ivhole of human beings, past, present, and 
future. The word ivhole points out clearly that you must not take 
in all men, but those only who are really capable of assimilation, 
in virtue of a real co-operation on their part in furthering the 
common good. 

On which the first comment suggesting itself is that 
the word 'ivhole points out clearly ' not limitation, but 
absence of limitation. Passing over this, however, 
and agreeing to exclude, as is intended, criminals, 
pauper, beggars, and all who ' remain in the parasitic 
state,' it seems that we are to include in the aggregate 
object of our worship all who have aided, now aid, and 
will hereafter aid, social growth and development. 
Though elsewhere 1 it is limited to those who 4 co-ope- 
rate willingly,' yet since ' the animals which volun- 
tarily aid man ' are recognized as ' integral portions 
of the Great Being,' and since the co-operation of 
slaves is as ' voluntary ' as that of horses, we seem 
compelled to include, not the superior men and classes 
only, but even those who, under a coercion such as is 
used to domestic animals, have helped to subdue the 
Earth and further the material progress of Humanity. 
And since the progress of Humanity has been largely 
aided by the spread of the higher races and accom- 
panying extermination of the lower races, we must 
comprehend in our conception of this worshipful 
4 Great Being ' all those who, from the earliest sav- 
age times, have, as leading warriors and common 

1 Positive Polity, vol. iv. pp. 27, 33. 



HEEBERT SPENCER. 69 

soldiers, helped by their victories to replace inferior 
societies by superior ones : not only bloodthirsty con- 
querors like Sesostris (who is duly sanctified in the 
calendar), but even such cannibals as the Aztecs, who 
laid the basis of the Mexican civilization. 

So far from seeing in the ' Great Being Humanity,' 
as thus defined, anything worshipful, it seems to me 
that contemplation of it is calculated to excite feel- 
ings which it is best to keep out of consciousness. 

But now, not to take the doctrine at a disadvan- 
tage, let us conceive the object of the Positivist's 
adoration under a better aspect. Let us consider 
what claims to godhood may be made for the Hu- 
manity immediately known to us. Unquestionably 
M. Comte's own doctrine, that there has been going 
on an evolution of mankind, implies that such por- 
tion of the ' Great Being Humanity ' as is formed by 
our own generation, is better than the average of 
those portions which have heretofore lived and died. 
What then shall we say of this better portion ? 

Of course we must keep out of thought all the bad 
conduct going on around — the prevailing dishonesty 
shown in adulteration by retailers and production of 
debased goods by manufacturers, the inefficient and 
dawdling work of artisans, the many fraudulent 
transactions of which a few are daily disclosed at 
trials; though why we are to exclude the blame- 
worthy from our conception of Humanity, I do not 
understand. But not dwelling on this, let us con- 
template first the intellectual traits, and then the 



70 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

moral traits, of the people who remain after leaving 
out the worse. 

Those whose mental appetites are daily satisfied by- 
table talk almost wholly personal, by gossiping books 
and novels, and by newspapers, the contents of which 
are usually enjoyed the more in proportion as there 
is in them much of the scandalous or the horrible — 
those who on Sundays, never working out their own 
beliefs, receive the weekly dole of thought called for 
by their state of spiritual pauperism — those who, to 
the ideas they received during education, add only 
such as are supplied by daily journals and weekly 
sermons, with now and then a few from books, hav- 
ing none of their own worth speaking of ; we may be 
content to class as respectable in the conventional 
sense, though scarcely in any higher sense — still 
less to include them as chief components in a body 
exciting reverence. Even if we limit attention to 
those of highest culture, including all who are 
concerned in regulative functions, political, ecclesi- 
astical, educational, or other, the displays of intelli- 
gence do not call forth such an emotion as that which 
M. Comte's theory requires us to entertain. What 
shall we say of the wisdom of those, including nearly 
all who occupy influential positions, who persist in 
thinking that preparation for successful and complete 
living (which is the purpose of rational education) 
is best effected by learning to speak and write after 
the manner of two extinct peoples, and by gaining 
knowledge of their chief men, their superstitions, 
their deeds of war, etc. — who, in their leading 



HERBERT SPENCER. 71 

school, devote two hours per week to getting some 
ideas about the constitution of the world they are 
born into, and thirty-six hours per week to constru- 
ing Latin and Greek and making verses, of small 
sense or none ; and who, in the competitive examina- 
tions they devise, give to knowledge of words double 
the number of marks which they give to knowledge 
of things ? That, it seems to me, is not a very wor- 
shipful degree of intelligence which fails to recognize 
the obvious truth that there is an Order of Nature, 
pervading alike the actions going on within us and 
without us, to which, from moment to moment, our 
lives must conform under penalty of one or other 
evil ; and that therefore our first business must be to 
study this Order of Nature. Nor is estimation of 
this intelligence raised on contemplating the outcome 
of this established culture, as seen in Parliament ; 
where any proposal to judge a question by reference 
to general laws, or 'abstract principles' as they are 
called, is pooh-poohed, with the tacit implication that 
in social affairs there is no natural law ; and where, 
as we lately saw, 300 select spokesmen of the nation 
cheered frantically when it was decided that they 
should continue to vow before God that they would 
maintain certain arrangements prescribed for them 
by their great, great, etc. grandfathers. 

On turning to the moral manifestations, Ave find 
still less that is calculated to excite the required re- 
ligious feeling. When multitudes of citizens belong- 
ing to the classes distinguished as the better, make a 
hero of a politician whose sole aim throughout life 



72 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

was success, regardless of principle, and have even 
established an annual commemoration of him, we are 
obliged to infer that the prevailing sentiments are 
not of a very high order. Nothing approaching to 
adoration is called forth by those who, on the death 
of a youth who went to help in killing Zulus, with 
whom he had no quarrel, and all that he might in- 
crease his chance of playing despot over the French, 
thought him worthy of high funeral honors — would, 
many of them, indeed, have given him the highest. 
No feeling of reverence arises in one's mind on think- 
ing of people who looked on with approval or toler- 
ance when a sailor of fortune, who has hired himself 
out to an eastern tyrant to slay at the word of com- 
mand, was honored here by a banquet. A public 
opinion which recognizes no criminality in wholesale 
homicide, so long as it is committed by a constituted 
political authority, no matter how vile, or by its for- 
eign hired agent, is a public opinion which excites, 
in some at any rate, an emotion nearer to contempt 
than to adoration. 

This emotion is not changed on looking abroad 
and contemplating the implied natures of those who 
guide, and the implied natures of those who accept 
the guidance. When, among a people professing that 
religion of peace preached to them generation after 
generation by tens of thousands of priests, an assem- 
bly receives with enthusiasm, as lately at the Gambetta 
dinner, the toast, ' The French army, the highest em- 
bodiment of the French nation ' — when, along with 
nominal acceptance of forgiveness as a Christian duty, 



HERBERT SPENCER. 73 

there goes intense determination to retaliate ; we are 
obliged to reprobate either the feeling which they 
actually think proper, or the hypocrisy with which 
they profess that the opposite feeling is proper. On 
finding in another advanced society that the seats of 
highest culture are the seats of discipline in barbarism, 
where the test of manhood is the giving and taking 
of wounds in fights arising from trivial causes or 
none at all, and where, last year, a single day wit- 
nessed twenty-one such encounters in one university ; 
we are reminded more of North American Indians, 
among whom tortures constitute the initiation of 
young men, than of civilized people taught for a 
thousand years to do good even to enemies. Or 
when we see, as lately in a nation akin to the last, 
that an officer who declined to break at once the law 
of his country and the law of his religion by fighting 
a duel was expelled the army ; we are obliged to ad- 
mit that profession of a creed which forbids revenge, 
by those whose deeds emphatically assert revenge to 
be a duty (almost as emphatically as do the lowest 
races of men), presents Humanity under an aspect not 
at all of the kind which we look for in 4 the adorable 
Great Being.' Not reverence, not admiration, scarcely 
even respect, is caused by the sight of a hundred mil- 
lion Pagans masquerading as Christians. 

I am told that by certain of M. Comte's disciples 
(though not by those Mr. Harrison represents) prayer 
is addressed to 'holy Humanity.' Had I to choose 
an epithet, I think ' holy ' is about the last which 
would occur to me. 



74 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

'But it is only the select human beings — those 
more especially who are sanctified in the Comtist 
calendar — who are to form the object of worship ; 
and, for the worship of such, there is the reason that 
they are the benefactors to whom we owe every- 
thing. 5 

On the first of these statements, made by some ad- 
herents of M. Comte, one remark must be that it is 
at variance with M. Comte's own definition of the 
object of worship, as quoted above ; and another re- 
mark must be that, admitting such select persons to 
be worshipful (and I do not admit it), there is no 
more reason for worshipping Humanity as a whole on 
the strength of these best samples, than there is for 
worshipping an ordinary individual, or even a criminal, 
on the strength of the few good actions which quali- 
fied the multitudinous indifferent actions and bad 
actions he committed. The second of these state- 
ments, that Humanity, either as the whole defined by 
M. Comte or as represented by these select persons, 
must be adored as being the producer of everything 
which civilization has brought us, and in a measure, 
even the creator of our higher powers of thought and 
action, we will now consider. Let us hear M. Comte 
himself on this point : — 

Thus each step of sound training in positive thought awakens 
perpetual feelings of veneration and gratitude ; which rise often 
into enthusiastic admiration of the Great Being, who is the Author 
of all these conquests, he they in thought, or he they in action. 1 

What may have been the conceptions of ' venera- 
1 System of Positive Polity, vol. ii. p. 45. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 75 

tion and gratitude ' entertained by M. Comte, we 
cannot, of course, say ; but if anyone not a disciple 
will examine his consciousness, he will, I think, 
quickly perceive that veneration or gratitude felt to- 
wards any being, implies belief in the conscious action 
of that being — implies ascription of a prompting 
motive of a high kind, and deeds resulting from it : 
gratitude cannot be entertained towards something 
which is unconscious. So that the 'Great Being 
Humanity ' must be conceived as having in its incor- 
porated form, ideas, feelings, and volitions. Natur- 
ally there follows the inquiry — ' Where is its seat ot 
consciousness?' Is it diffused throughout mankind 
at large ? That cannot be ; for consciousness is an 
organized combination of mental states, implying 
instantaneous communications such as certainly do 
not exist throughout Humanity. Where, then, must 
be its centre of consciousness? In France, of course, 
which, in the Comtean system, is to be the leading 
State ; and naturally in Paris, to which all the major 
axes of the temples of Humanity are to point. Any- 
one with adequate humor might raise amusing ques- 
tions respecting the constitution of that consciousness 
of the Great Being supposed to be thus localized. 
But, preserving our gravity, we have simply to rec- 
ognize the obvious truth that Humanity has no 
corporate consciousness whatever. Consciousness, 
known to each as existing in himself, is ascribed by 
him to other beings like himself, and, in a measure, 
to inferior beings ; and there is not the slightest 
reason for supposing that there ever was, is now, or 



76 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

ever will be, any consciousness among men save that 
which exists in them individually. If, then, ' the 
Great Being, who is the Author of all these con- 
quests,' is unconscious, the emotions of veneration 
and gratitude are absolutely irrelevant. 

It will doubtless seem a paradox to say that human 
evolution with all its marvels, is to be credited 
neither to Humanity as an aggregate, nor to its com- 
ponent individuals ; but the paradox will not be diffi- 
cult to justify: especially if we set out with some 
aualogies. An apt one is supplied by that 'thing of 
beauty,' the Euplectella or 'Venus' flower-basket,' 
now not uncommon as a drawing-room ornament. 
This fragile piece of animal architecture is not a pro- 
duct of any conscious creature, or of any combination 
of conscious creatures. It is the framework un- 
knowingly elaborated by innumerable ciliated monads 
— each a simple nucleated cell, with a whip-like 
appendage which serves, by its waving movements, 
to aid the drawing in and sending out of sea-water, 
from which nutritive matter is obtained; and it is 
simply by the proclivities which these monads have 
towards certain modes of growth and secretion, that 
they form, without the consciousness of any one, or 
of all, this complicated city they inhabit. Again, 
take the case of a coral island. By it we are shown 
that a multitude of insignificant individuals may, by 
their separate actions carried on without concert, 
generate a structure imposing by its size and stability. 
One of these palm-covered atolls standing up out of 
vast depths in the Pacific, has been slowly built up 



HERBERT SPENCER. 77 

by coral-polyps, while, through successive small stages, 
the ocean-bottom has subsided. The mass produced 
by these brainless and almost nerveless animals — 
each by its tentacles slowly drawing in such food as 
the water occasionally brings, and at intervals bud- 
ding out, plant-like, a new individual — is a mass ex- 
ceeding in vastness any built by men, and defies the 
waves in a way which their best breakwaters fail to 
do : the whole structure being entirely undesigned, 
and, indeed, absolutely unknown to its producers, 
individually or in their aggregate. 

Prepared by these analogies, every one will see 
what is meant by the paradox that civilization, 
whether contemplated in its great organized societies 
or in their material and mental products, can be cred- 
ited neither to any ideal ' Great Being Humanity,' 
nor to the real beings summed up under that abstract 
name. Though we cannot in this case say that nei- 
ther the aggregate nor its units have had any con- 
sciousness of the results wrought out, yet we may say 
that only after considerable advances of civilization 
has this consciousness existed on the part of a few. 
Communities have grown and organized themselves 
through the attainments of private ends, pursued with 
entire selfishness, and in utter ignorance of any social 
effects produced. If we begin with those early stages 
in which, among hostile tribes, one more numerous 
or better led than the rest, conquers them, and, con- 
solidating them into a larger society, at the same time 
stops inter-tribal Avars : we are shown that this step 
in advance is made, not only without thought of any 



78 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

advantage to Humanity, but often under the prompt- 
ings of the basest motives in the mind of the most 
atrocious savage. And so onwards. It needs but to 
glance at such wall-paintings as those of the conquer- 
ing Seti at Karnak, or to read the inscriptions in 
which Assyrian kings proudly narrated their great 
deeds, to see that personal ambitions were pursued 
with absolute disregard of human welfare. But for 
that admiration of military glory with which classical 
culture imbues each rising generation, it would be 
felt that whatever benefits these kings unknowingly 
wrought, their self-praising records have brought them 
not much more honor than has been brought to the 
Fijian chief Ra Undreundre by the row of nine hun- 
dred stones recording the number of victims he de- 
voured. And though these struggles for supremacy in 
which, during European history, so many millions 
have been sacrificed, resulted in the formation of 
great nations fitted for the highest types of structure ; 
yet when, hereafter, opinion is no longer swayed by 
public school ethics, it will be seen that the men who 
effected these unions did so from desires which should 
class them with criminals rather than with the bene- 
factors of mankind. With government organizations 
it was the same as with social consolidations: they 
arose not to secure the blessings of order, but to 
maintain the ruler's power. As the original motive 
for preventing quarrels among soldiers was that the 
army might not be rendered inefficient before the 
enemy: so, throughout the militant society at large, 
the motive for suppressing conflicts was partly that 



HERBERT SPENCER. 79 

of preventing hindrance to the king's wars, and 
partly that of asserting his authority. Administra- 
tion of justice, as we know it, grew up incidentally ; 
and began with bribing the ruling man to interfere 
on behalf of the complaint. Not wishes for the pub- 
lic weal, but wishes for private profit and power, origi- 
nated the regulative organizations of societies. So 
has it been, too, with their industrial organizations. 
Acts of barter between primitive men were not 
prompted by thoughts of benefits to Humanity, to be 
eventually achieved by division of labor. When, as 
among various peoples, on occasions of assembling to 
make sacrifices at sacred places, some of the devotees 
took with them commodities likely to be wanted by 
others who would be there, and from whom needful 
supplies could be got in exchange, they never dreamed 
that they were making the first steps towards estab- 
lishment of fairs, and eventually of markets : purely 
selfish desires prompted them. Nor on the part of 
the pedlars who, supplying themselves wholesale at 
these gatherings, travelled about selling retail, was 
there any beneficent intention of initiating that vast 
and elaborate distributing system which now exists. 
Neither they nor any men of their time had imagined 
such a system. And the like holds of improved arts, 
of inventions, and, in large measure, of discoveries. 
It was not philanthropy which prompted the clearing 
of wild lands for the purpose of growing food ; it was 
not philanthropy which little by little improved the 
breeds of animals, and adapted them to human use ; it 
was not philanthropy which in course of time changed 



80 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

the primitive plough into the finished modern plough. 
Wishes for private satisfactions were the exclusive 
stimuli. The successive patents taken out by Watt, 
and his law-suits in defence of them, show that 
though he doubtless foresaw some of the benefits 
which the steam-engine would confer on mankind, 
yet foresight of these was not the prime mover of his 
acts. The long concealment of the method of flux- 
ions by Newton, as well as the Newton-Leibnitz 
controversy which subsequently arose, shows us that 
while there was perception of the benefits to science, 
and indirectly to Humanity, from the discoveries 
made by these mathematicians, yet that desires to 
confer these benefits were secondary to other desires 
— largely the love of scientific exploration itself, and, 
in a considerable degree, i the last infirmity of noble 
minds.' Nor has it been otherwise with literature. 
Entirely dissenting, though I do, from the dictum of 
Johnson, that ' no man but a blockhead ever wrote 
except for money,' and knowing perfectly well that 
many books have been written by others than block- 
heads not only without expectation of profit, but 
with the certainty of loss ; yet I hold it clear that 
the majority of authors do not differ from their fellow 
men to the extent that the desire to confer public 
benefit predominates over the desire to reap private 
benefit : in the shape of satisfied ambition if not in 
the shape of pecuniary return. And it is the same 
with the delights given to mankind by artistic pro- 
ducts. The mind of the artist, whether composer, 
painter, or sculptor, has always been in a much 



HERBERT SPENCER. 81 

greater degree occupied by the pleasure of creation 
and the thought of reward, material or mental, than 
by the wish to add to men's gratifications. 

But we are most clearly shown how little either 
any aims of an ideal 4 Great Being,' or any philan- 
thropic aims of individuals, have had to do with civ- 
ilization, by an instance which M. Comte himself 
refers to as proving our indebtedness. He says : — 
'Language alone might suffice to recall to the mind 
of every one, how completely every creation of man is 
the result of a vast combination of -efforts, equally 
extended over time and space.' 1 Now nothing is 
more manifest than that language has been produced 
neither by the conscious efforts of the imagined 
4 Great Being, who is the Author of all these con- 
quests,' nor by the conscious efforts of individual 
men. Passing over that intentional coining of words 
which occurs during the later stages of linguistic 
progress, it is undeniable that during those earlier 
stages which gave to languages their essential struc- 
tures and vocabularies, the evolutionary process went 
on without the intention of those who were instru- 
mental to it. The man who first, when discussing a 
probability, said give (i.e. grant, or admit) so-and-so, 
and such and such follows, had no idea that by his 
metaphorical give (which became gif and then if) he 
w r as helping to initiate a grammatical form. The 
original application of the word orange to some object 
like an orange in color, was made without conscious- 
ness that the act would presently lead to enrichment 
1 Positive Polity, vol. ii. p. 48. 



82 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

of the language by an additional adjective. And so 
throughout. The minute additions and modifications 
which have, in thousands of years, given to human 
speech its present perfection, arose as random changes 
without thought of improvement ; and the good ones 
insensibly spread as serving better the purposes of 
those Avho adopted them. 

Thus, accepting M. Comte's typical instance of the 
obligations under which Humanity during the past 
has placed individuals at present, we must say that 
language, having been evolved during men's inter- 
course without the least design on their parts of 
conferring benefits, and without the faintest con- 
sciousness of what they were doing, affords no reason 
whatever for regarding them with that 'veneration 
and gratitude ' which he thinks due. 

'But surely "veneration and gratitude" are due 
somewhere. Surely civilized society, with its com- 
plex arrangements and involved processes, its mul- 
titudinous material products and almost magical 
instruments, its language, science, literature, art, 
must be credited to some agency or other. If • the 
" Great Being Humanity," considered as a whole, 
has not created it for us — if the individuals who 
have co-operated in producing it have done so while 
pursuing their private ends, mostly without con- 
sciousness that the} r were either furthering or hin- 
dering human progress, Iioav happens it that such 
benefits have been achieved, and to what shall we 
attribute achievement of them ? ' 



HERBERT SPENCER. 83 

To Mr. Harrison, if his allegiance to his master is 
unqualified, no answer which he will think satis- 
factory can be given ; . for M. Comte negatives the 
recognition of any cause for the existence of human 
beings and the i Great Being ' composed of them. It 
was one of his strange inconsistencies that, though he 
held it legitimate to inquire into the evolution of 
the Solar System (as is shown by his acceptance 
of the nebular hypothesis), and though he treats of 
human society as a product of evolution, yet all that 
region lying between the formation of planets and 
the origin of primitive man, was ignored by him. 
To those, however, who accept the doctrine of or- 
ganic evolution, either with or without the doctrine 
of evolution at large, the obvious answer to the above 
question will be that if 'veneration and gratitude' 
are due at all, they are due to that Ultimate Cause 
from which Humanity, individually and as a whole, in 
common with all other things, has proceeded. There 
is nothing in embodied Humanity but what results 
from the properties of its units — properties mainly 
pre-historic, and in a small measure generated by social 
life. If we ask whence come these properties — these 
structures and functions, bodily and mental — we 
must go for our answer to the slow operation of those 
processes of modification and complication through 
which, with the aid of surrounding conditions, ever 
themselves growing more involved, there have been 
produced the multitudinous organic types, up to the 
highest. If we persist in putting question beyond 
question, we are carried back to those more general 



84 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

causes which determined the structure and compo- 
sition of the Earth during its concentration ; and 
eventually we are carried back to the nebulous mass 
in which there existed, undistinguished into those 
concrete forms we now know, the forces out of which 
all things contained in the Solar System have come, 
and in which there must have been, as Professor 
Tyndall expresses it, c the promise and potency of all 
terrestrial life.' Whether we contemplate such ex- 
ternal changes as those of stars moving ten miles per 
second, and those which now in hours, now in years, 
now in centuries, arrange molecules into a crystal ; 
or whether we contemplate internal changes, arising 
in us as ideas and feelings, and arising also in the 
chick which but a few weeks since was a viscid yelk, 
we are compelled to recognize everywhere an Energy 
capable of all forms, and which has been ever assum- 
ing new forms, from the remotest time to which 
science carries us back, down to the passing moment. 
If we take the highest product of evolution, civilized 
human society, and ask to what agency all its mar- 
vels must be credited, the inevitable answer is — To 
that Unknown Cause of which the entire Cosmos is 
a manifestation. 

A spectator who, seeing a bubble floating on a 
great river, had his attention so absorbed by the bub- 
ble that he ignored the river — nay, even ridiculed 
any one who thought that the river out of which the 
bubble arose and into which it would presently lapse, 
deserved recognition — would fitly typify a disciple 
of M. Comte, who, centring all his higher sentiments 



HERBERT SPENCER. 85 

on Humanity, holds it absurd to let either thought or 
feeling be occupied with that great stream of Crea- 
tive Power, unlimited in Space or in Time, of which 
Humanity is a transitory product. Even if, instead 
of being the dull leaden-hued thing it is, the bubble 
Humanity had reached that stage of iridescence of 
which, happily, a high sample of man or woman some- 
times shows us a beginning, it would still owe what- 
ever there was in it of beauty to that Infinite and 
Eternal Energy out of which Humanity has quite re- 
cently emerged, and into which it must, in course of 
time, subside. And to suppose that this relatively- 
evanescent form of existence ought to occupy our 
minds so exclusively as to leave no space for a con- 
sciousness of that Ultimate Existence of which it is 
but one form out of multitudes — an Ultimate Exist- 
ence which was manifested in infinitely-varied ways 
before Humanity arose, and will be manifested in in- 
finitely-varied other ways when Humanity has ceased 
to be, seems very strange — to me, indeed, amazing. 

And here this contrast between the positivist view 
and my own view, equally marked now as it was at 
first, leads me to ask in what respect the criticisms 
passed on the article — ' Religion : a Retrospect and 
Prospect,' have affected its argument. Many years 
ago, as also by implication in that article, I contended 
that while Science shows that we can know phe- 
nomena only, its arguments involve no denial of an 
Existence beyond phenomena. In common with 
leading scientific men whose opinions are known to 
me, I hold that it does not bring us to an ultimate 



86 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

negation, as the presentations of my view made by 
Mr. Harrison and Sir James Stephen imply ; and they 
have done nothing to show that its outcome is nega- 
tive. Contrariwise, the thesis originally maintained 
by me against thinkers classed as orthodox, * and re- 
asserted after this long interval, is that though the 
nature of the Reality transcending appearances can- 
not be known, yet that its existence is necessarily 
implied by all we do know — that though no concep- 
tion of this Reality can be framed by us, yet that an 
indestructible consciousness of it is the very basis of 
our intelligence ; 2 and I do not find, either in Mr. 
Harrison's criticisms or in those of Sir James Stephen, 
any endeavor to prove the untruth of this thesis. 
Moreover, as at first elaborated and as lately repeated, 
my argument was that in the discovery by Science 
that it could not do more than ascertain the order 
among phenomena, there was involved a tacit confes- 
sion of impotence in presence of the Mystery of 
Things — a confession which brought Science into 
sympathy with Religion ; and that in their joint rec- 
ognition of an Unknowable Cause for all the effects 
constituting the knowable world, Religion and Sci- 
ence would reach a truth common to the two. I do 
not see that anything said by my critics has shaken 
this position. I held at the outset, and continue to 
hold, that this Inscrutable Existence which Science, 

1 First Principles, § 26. 

2 Sir James Stephen, who appears perplexed by the distinction 
between a conception and a consciousness, will find an explanation 
of it in First Principles, § 26. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 87 

in the last resort, is compelled to recognize as un- 
reached by its deepest analyses of matter, motion, 
thought, and feeling, stands towards our general con- 
ception of things in substantially the same relation 
as does the Creative Power asserted by Theology ; 
and that when Theology, which has already dropped 
many of the anthropomorphic traits ascribed, eventu- 
ally drops the last of them, the foundation-beliefs of 
the two must become identical. So far as I see, 
no endeavor has been made to show that this is 
not the case. Further, I have contended, originally 
and in the article named, that this Reality transcend- 
ing appearance (which is not simply unknown, as Mr. 
Harrison thinks it should be called, but is proved by 
analysis of the forms of our intelligence to be un- 
knowable), 1 standing towards the Universe and to- 
wards ourselves in the same relation as an anthropo- 
morphic Creator was supposed to stand, bears a like 
relation with it not only to human thought but to 
human feeling : the gradual replacement of a Power 
allied to humanity in certain traits, by a Power which 
we cannot say is thus allied, leaves unchanged cer- 
tain of the sentiments comprehended under the name 
religious. Though I have argued that in ascribing 
to the Unknowable Cause of things such human at- 
tributes as emotion, will, and intelligence, we are 
using words which, when thus applied, have no cor- 
responding ideas ; yet I have also argued that we are 
just as much debarred from denying as we are from 
affirming such attributes ; 2 since, as ultimate analy- 

1 First Principles, Part I. chapter iv. 

2 First Principles, § 31. 



88 RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 

sis brings us everywhere to alternative impossibilities 
of thought, we are shown that beyond the phenome- 
nal order of things, our ideas of possible and impossi- 
ble are irrelevant. Nothing has been said which re- 
quires me to change this view : neither Mr. Harrison's 
statement that ' to make a religion out of the Unknow- 
able is far more extravagant than to make it out of the 
Equator,' nor Sir James Stephen's description of the 
Unknowable as ' like a gigantic soap-bubble not burst 
but blown thinner and thinner till it has become ab- 
solutely imperceptible,' seems to me applicable. One 
who says that because the Infinite and Eternal En- 
ergy from which all things proceed, cannot in any 
way be brought within the limits of human conscious- 
ness, it therefore approaches to a nonentity, seems to 
me like one who says of a vast number that because 
it passes all possibility of enumeration it is like noth- 
ing, which is also innumerable. Once more, when 
implying that the Infinite and Eternal Energy mani- 
fested alike within us and without us, and to which 
we must ascribe not only the manifestations them- 
selves but the law of their order, will hereafter con- 
tinue to be, under its transfigured form, an object of 
religious sentiment; I have implied that whatever 
components of this sentiment disappear, there must 
ever survive those which are appropriate to the con- 
sciousness of a Mystery that cannot be fathomed and 
a Power that is omnipresent. Mr. Harrison and Sir 
James Stephen have said nothing to invalidate this 
position. Lastly, let me point out that I am not con- 
cerned to show what effect religious sentiment, as 



HERBERT SPENCER. 89 

hereafter thus modified, will have as a moral agent ; 
though Mr. Harrison, by ridiculing the supposition 
that it will ' make good men and women,' seems to 
imply that I have argued, or am bound to argue, that 
it will do this. If he will refer to the Data of Ethics 
and other books of mine, he will find that modifica- 
tions of human nature, past and future, I ascribe in 
the main to the continuous operations of surrounding 
social conditions and entailed habits of life ; though 
past forms of the religious consciousness have exer- 
cised, and future forms will I believe exercise, co-op- 
erative influences. 1 

How, then, does the case stand? Under 'Retro- 
spect,' I aimed to show how the religious conscious- 
ness arose ; and under ' Prospect,' what of this con- 
sciousness must remain when criticism has done its 
utmost. My opponents would have succeeded had 
they shown (1) that it did not arise as alleged ; or 

(2) that some other consciousness would remain ; or 

(3) that no consciousness would remain. They have 
done none of these things. Looking at the general 
results, it seems to me that while the things I have 
said have not been disproved, the things which have 
been disproved are things I have not said. 

Herbert Spencer. 

1 Data of Ethics, § 62. 



AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

Ten years ago I warned Mr. Herbert Spencer that 
his religion of the Unknowable was certain to lead 
him into strange company. ' To invoke the. Un- 
knowable,' I said, 4s to re-open the whole range of 
Metaphysics ; and the entire apparatus of Theology 
will follow through the breach.' I quoted Mr. G. 
Lewes's admirable remark, 1 'that the foundations of 
a creed can rest only on the Known and the Knowa- 
ble.' We see the result. Mr. Spencer has devel- 
oped his Unknowable into an 'Infinite and Eternal 
Energy, by which all things are created and sus- 
tained.' He has discovered it to be the Ultimate 
Cause, the All-Being, the Creative Power, and all the 
other 'alternative impossibilities of thought' which 
he once cast in the teeth of the older theologies. 
Naturally there is joy over one philosopher that re- 
penteth. The Christian World claims this as equiva- 
lent to the assertion that God is the mind and spirit 
of the universe ; and the Christian World says these 
words might have been used by Butler or Paley. 2 
i Problems of Life and Mind, vol. i. Preface. 
2 The Christian World, June 5 and July 3, 188*. 
90 



FEEDEEIC HAEEISON. 91 

This is, indeed, very true ; but it is strange to find 
the philosophy of one who makes it a point of con- 
science not to enter a church described as 'the fitting 
and natural introduction to inspiration ! ' 

The admirers of Mr. Spencer's genius — and I 
count myself amongst the earliest — will not regret 
that he has been induced to lay aside his vast task of 
philosophic synthesis, in order more fully to explain 
his views about Religion. This is, indeed, for the 
thoughtful, as well as the practical world, the great 
question of our age, and the discussion that was 
started by his paper * and by mine 2 has opened 
many topics of general interest. Mr. Spencer has 
been led to give to some of his views a certainly new 
development, and he has treated of matters which he 
had not previously touched. Various critics have 
joined the debate. Sir James Stephen 3 has brought 
into play his Nasmyth hammer of Common Sense, 
and has asked the bold and truly characteristic ques- 
tion : ' Can we not do just as well without any relig- 
ion at all ? ' The weekly Reviews, I am told, have 
been poking at us their somewhat hebdomadal fun. 
And then Mr. Wilfrid Ward, 4 ' the rising hope of 
the stern and unbending ' Papists, steps in to remind 
us of the ancient maxim — extra Ecclesiam nulla sa- 
lus. 

I cannot altogether agree with a friend who tells 
me that controversy is pure evil. It is not so when 

1 H. Spencer, in Nineteenth Century, January and July, 1884. 

2 F. Harrison, in Nineteenth Century, March, 1S84. 

3 Sir J. Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, June, 1884. 

4 W. Ward, in National lieview, June, 1884. 



92 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

it leads to a closer sifting of important doctrines ; 
when it is inspired with friendly feeling, and has no 
other object than to arrive at the truth. There were 
no mere c compliments ' in my expressions of respect 
for Mr. Spencer and his work. I habitually speak of 
him as the only living Englishmen who can fairly lay 
claim to the name of philosopher ; nay, he is, I be- 
lieve, the only man in Europe now living who has 
constructed a real system of philosophy. Very much 
in that philosophy I willingly adopt ; as a philosophi- 
cal theory I accept his idea of the Unknowable. My 
rejection of it as the basis of Religion is no new 
thing. The substance of my essay on the ' Ghost of 
Religion ' I have long ago taught at Newton Hall. 
The difference between Mr. Spencer and myself as to 
what religion means is vital and profound. So deep 
is it that it justifies me in returning to these ques- 
tions, and still further disturbing his philosophic 
labor. But our long friendship I trust will survive 
the inevitable dispute. 

It will clear up much at issue between us if it be 
remembered that to me this question is one primarily 
of religion ; to Mr. Spencer, one primarily of phil- 
osophy. He is dealing with transcendental concep- 
tions, intelligible only to certain trained metaphysi- 
cians: I have been dealing with religion as it affects 
the lives of men and women in the world. Hence, if 
I admit with him that philosophy points to an un- 
knowable and inconceivable Reality behind phe- 
nomena, I insist that, to ordinary men and women, an 
unknowable and inconceivable Reality is practically 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 93 

an Unreality. The Everlasting Yes winch the Evo- 
lutionist metaphysician is conscious of, but cannot 
conceive, is in effect on the public a mere Everlasting 
No ; and a religion which begins and ends with the 
mystery of the Unknowable is not religion at all, but 
a mere logician's formula. This is how it comes 
about that Mr. Spencer complains that I have misun- 
derstood him or have not read his books, that I fail 
to represent him, or even misrepresent him. I can- 
not admit that I have either misunderstood him or 
misrepresented him on any single point. I have 
studied his books part by part and chapter by chap- 
ter, and have examined the authorities on which he 
relies. 

He seems to think that all hesitation to accept his 
views will disappear if men will only turn to his 
First Principles, his Principles of Sociology and his 
Descriptive Sociology, where he has 4 proved ' this and 
' disproved ' that, and arrayed the arguments and 
the evidence for every doctrine in turn. Now, for 
my part, I have studied all this to my great pleasure 
and profit, since the first number of A Synthetic Phil- 
osophy appeared. Mr. Spencer objects to discipleship, 
or I would say that I am in very many things one of 
his disciples myself. But in this matter of religion I 
hold still, as I have held from the first, that Mr. 
Spencer is mistaken as to the history, the nature, and 
the function of religion. It is quite true that he and 
I are at opposite poles in what relates to the work of 
religion on man and on life. In all he has writ- 
ten, he treats religion as mainly a thing of the mind, 



94 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

and concerned essentially with mystery. I say — 
and here I am on my own ground — that religion is 
mainly a thing of feeling and of conduct, and is con- 
cerned essentially with duty. I agree that religion 
has also an intellectual base ; but here I insist that 
this intellectual basis must rest on something that 
can be known and conceived and at least partly un- 
derstood ; and that it cannot be found at all in what 
is unknowable, inconceivable, and in no way what- 
ever to be understood. 

Now, in maintaining this, I have with me almost 
the whole of the competent minds which have dealt 
with this question. Mr. Spencer puts it rather as if 
it were merely fanaticism on my part which prevents 
me from accepting his theory of Religion ; as if Sir 
James Stephen's difficulties would disappear if he 
could be induced to read the Principles of Sociology 
and the rest. Mr. Spencer must remember that in 
his Religion of the Unknowable he stands almost 
alone. He is, in fact, insisting to mankind, in a mat- 
ter where all men have some opinion, on one of the 
most gigantic paradoxes in the history of thought. 
I know myself of no single thinker in Europe who 
has come forward to support this religion of an Un- 
knowable Cause, which cannot be presented in terms 
of consciousness, to which the words emotion, will, 
intelligence cannot be applied with any meaning, and 
yet which stands in the place of a supposed anthro- 
pomorphic Creator. Mr. George H. Lewes, who of 
all modern philosophers was the closest to Mr. Spen- 
cer, and of recent English philosophers the most 



FREDERIC HARRISOX. 95 

nearly his equal, wrote ten years ago : — ' Deeply as 
we may feel the mystery of the universe and the 
limitations of our faculties, the foundations of a creed 
can only rest on the Known and the Know able? With 
that I believe every school of thought but a few 
dreamy mystics have agreed. Every religious teach- 
er, movement, or body, has equally started from 
that. For myself, I feel that I stand alongside of 
the religious spirits of every time and of every church 
in claiming for religion some intelligible object of 
reverence, and the field of feeling and of conduct, as 
well as that of awe. Every notice of my criticism of 
Mr. Spencer which has fallen under my eye adopted 
my view of the hollowness of the Unknowable as a 
basis of Religion. So say Agnostics, Materialists, 
Sceptics, Christians, Catholics, Theists, and Positiv- 
ists. All with one consent disclaim making a Relis;- 
ion of the Unknowable. Mr. Herbert Spencer may 
construct an Athanasian Creed of the 'Inscrutable 
Existence' — which is neither God nor being — bnt 
he stands as yet Athanasius contra mundwm. It is 
not, therefore, through the hardness of my heart and 
the stiffness of my neck that I cannot follow him 
here. 

Let us now sum up the various positions which 
Mr. Spencer would impose on us as to Religion. 
After his two articles and the recent discussion we 
can hardly mistake him, and they justify my saying 
that they form a gigantic paradox. Mr. Spencer 
maintains that : — 

1. The proper object of Religion is a Something 



96 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

which can never be known, or conceived, or under- 
stood ; to which we cannot apply the terms emotion, 
will, intelligence ; of which we cannot affirm or deny 
that it is either person, or being, or mind, or matter, 
or indeed anything else. 

2. All that we can say of it is, that it is an Inscru- 
table Existence or an Unknowable Cause: we can 
neither know nor conceive what it is, nor how it 
came about, nor how it operates. It is, notwithstand- 
ing, the Ultimate Cause, the All-Being, the Creative 

Power. . 

3. The essential business of Religion, so under- 
stood, is to keep alive the consciousness of a mystery 
that cannot be fathomed. ; 

4. We are not concerned with the question, ' What 
effect this religion will have as a moral agent?' or, 
'Whether it will make good men and women/ 
Religion has to do with mystery, not with morals. 

These are the paradoxes to which my fanaticism 
refuses to assent. _ . 

Now these were the views about Religion which 1 
found in Mr. Spencer's first article, and they certainly 
are repeated in his second. He says r- ' The Power 
which transcends phenomena cannot be brought with- 
in the forms of our finite thought.' 'The Ultimate 
Power is not representable in terms of human con- 
sciousness.' ' The attributes of personality cannot be 
conceived by us as attributes of the Unknown Cause 
of things ' ' The nature of the Reality transcending 
appearances cannot be known, yet its existence is ne- 
cessarily implied.' ' No conception of this Reality can 



'' FREDERIC HARRISON. ? 97 

be framed by us.' ' This Inscrutable Existence which 
Science, in the last resort, is compelled to recognize 
as unreached by its deepest analyses of matter, mo" 
tion, thought, and feeling.' 4 In ascribing to the 
Unknowable Cause of things such human attributes 
as emotion, will, intelligence, we are using words 
which, when thus applied, have no corresponding 
ideas.' There can be no kind of doubt about all this. 
I said Mr. Spencer proposes, as the object of religion, 
an abstraction which we cannot conceive, or present 
in thought, or regard as having personality, or as 
capable of feeling, purpose, or thought — in familiar 
words, I said it was ' a sort of a something, about 
which we can know nothing.' 

Mr. Spencer complains that I called this Something 
a negaton, an All-Nothingness, an (V 1 ), and an Ever- 
lasting No. He now says that this Something is the 
All-Being. The Unknowable is the Ultimate Reality 
— the sole existence; — the entire Cosmos, as we are 
conscious of it, being a mere show. In familiar 
words: — Everything is nought, and the Unknowable 
is the onl} r real Thing. I quite agree that this is 
Mr. Spencer's position as a metaphysician. It is not 
at all new to me, for it is worked out in his First 
Principles most distinctly. Ten years ago, when I 
reviewed Mr. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind, I 
criticised Mr. Spencer's Transfigured Realism as being 
too absolute. 1 I then stated my own philosophical 
position to be that, i our scientific conceptions within 
have a good working correspondence with an (as- 
1 Fortnightly Review, 1874, p. 89. 



98 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

sumed) reality without — we having no means of 
knowing whether the absolute correspondence be- 
tween them be great or small, or whether there be 
any absolute correspondence at all.' To that I ad- 
here ; and, whilst I accept the doctrine of an Un- 
known substratum, I cannot assent to the doctrine 
that the Unknowable is the Absolute Reality. But 
I am quite aware that he holds it, nor have I ever 
said that he did not. On the contrary, I granted 
that it might be the first axiom of science or the 
universal postulate of philosophy. But it is not a 

religion. 1 

I said then, and I say still, speaking with regard 
to religion, and from the religious point of view, that 
the Metaphysician's Unknowable is tantamount to a 
Nothing. The philosopher may choose to say that 
there is an Ultimate Reality which we cannot con- 
ceive, or know, or liken to anything we do know. 
But these subtleties of speculation are utterly unin- 
telligible to the ordinary public. And to tell them 
that they are to worship this Unknowable is equi- 
valent to telling them to worship nothing. I quite 
agree that Mr. Spencer, or any metaphysician, is 
entitled to assert that the Unknowable is the sole 
Reality. But religion is not a matter for Metaphy- 
sicians— but for men, women, and children. And 
to them the Unknowable is Nothing. Sir James 
Stephen calls the distinctions of Mr. Spencer 'an 

i My words were that, 'Although the Unknowable is logically 
said to be Something, yet the something of which we neither know 
nor conceive anything is practically nothing.' That is, speaking 
from the point of view of religion. 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 99 

unmeaning play of words.' I do not say that they 
are unmeaning to the philosophers working on met- 
aphysics. But to the public, seeking for a religion, 
the Reality or the Unreality of the Unknowable is 
certainly an unmeaning play of words. 

Even supposing that Evolution ever could bring 
the people to comprehend the subtlety of the All- 
Being, of which all things we know are only shows, 
the Unknowable is still incapable of supplying the 
very elements of Religion. Mr. Spencer thinks other- 
wise. He says, that although we cannot know, or 
conceive it, or apply to it any of the terms of life, 
or of consciousness, ' it leaves unchanged certain of 
the sentiments comprehended under the name re- 
ligion.' ' Whatever components of the religious sen- 
timent disappear, there must ever survive those which 
are appropriate to the consciousness of a Mystery ! ' 
Certain of the religious sentiments are left un- 
changed ! The consciousness of a M}^stery is to sur- 
vive ! Is that all? 'We are not concerned,' says he, 
'to know what effect this religious sentiment will have 
as a moral agent ! ' A religion without anything to 
be known, with nothing to teach, with, no moral 
power, with some rags of religious sentiment surviv- 
ing, mainly the consciousness of M}~stery; this is, 
indeed, the mockery of Religion. 

Forced, as it seems, to clothe the nakedness of the 
Unknowable with some shreds of sentiment, Mr. 
Spencer has given it a positive character, which for 
every step that it advances towards Religion recedes 
from sound Philosophy. The Unknowable was at 



100 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

first spoken of as an 'unthinkable abstraction,' and 
so undoubtedly it is. But it finally emerges as the 
Ultimate Reality, the Ultimate Cause, the All-Being, 
the Absolute Power, the Unknown Cause, the In- 
scrutable Existence, the Infinite and Eternal Energy, 
from which all things proceed, the Creative Power, 
' the Infinite and Eternal Energy, by which all things 
are created and sustained.' It is 'to stand in sub- 
stantially the same relation towards our general 
conception of things as does the Creative Power 
asserted by Theology.' ' It stands towards the Uni- 
verse, and towards ourselves, in the same relation as 
an anthropomorphic Creator was supposed to stand, 
bears a like relation with it not only to human 
thought but to human feeling.' In other words, the 
Unknowable is the Creator ; subject to this, that we 
cannot assert or deny that he, she, or it, is Person, or 
Being, or can feel, think, or act, or do. anything else 
that we can either know or imagine, or is such that 
we can ascribe to Him, Her, or It, anything whatever 
within the realm of consciousness. 

Now the Unknowable, so qualified and explained, 
offends against all the canons of criticism, so admir- 
ably set forth in First Principles, and especially 
those of Dean Mansel, therein quoted and adopted. 
The Unknowable is not unknowable if we know that 
'it creates and sustains all things.' One need not 
repeat all the metaphysical objections arrayed by 
Mr. Spencer himself against connecting the ideas of 
the Absolute, the Infinite, First Cause, and Creator 
with that of any one Power. How can Absolute 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 101 

Power create ? How can the Absolute be a Cause ? 
The Absolute excludes the relative ; and Creation 
and Cause both imply relation. How can the In- 
finite be a Cause, or create ? For if there be effect 
distinct from cause, or if there be something uncrea- 
ted, the infinite would be thereby limited. What is 
the meaning of All-Being ? Does it include, or not, 
its own manifestation? If the Cosmos is a mere 
show of an Unknown Cause, then the Unknown 
Cause is not Infinite, for it does not include the 
Cosmos ; and not Absolute, for the Universe is its 
manifestation, and all things proceed from it. That 
is to say, the Absolute is in relation to the Universe, 
as Cause and Effect. Again, if the 'very notions, 
beginning and end, cause and purpose, relative notions 
belonging to human thought, are probably irrelevant 
to the Ultimate Reality transcending human thought ' 
(Spencer, Nineteenth Century, p. 12 [ante, p. 22] ), 
how can we speak of the Ultimate Cause, or indeed 
of Infinite and Eternal? The philosophical difficul- 
ties of imagining a First Cause, so admirably put by 
Mr. Spencer years ago, are not greater than those of 
imagining an Ultimate Cause. The objections he 
states to the idea of Creation are not removed by 
talking of a Creative Power rather than a Creator 
God. If Mr. Spencer's new Creative Power ' stands 
towards our general conception of things in substan- 
tially the same relation as the Creative Power of 
Theology,' it is open to all the metaphysical dilem- 
mas so admirably stated in First Principles. Mr. 
Spencer cannot have it both ways. If his Unknow- 



102 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

able be the Creative Power and Ultimate Cause, it 
simply renews all the mystification of the old the- 
ologies. If his Unknowable be unknowable, then it 
is idle to talk of Infinite and Eternal Energy, sole 
Reality, All-Being, and Creative Power. This is the 
slip-slop of theologians which Mr. Spencer, as much as 
any man living, has finally torn to shreds. 

In what way does the notion of Ultimate Cause 
avoid the difficulties in the way of First Cause, and 
how is Creative Power an idea more logical than 
Creator ? And if, as Mr. Spencer says (First Prin- 
ciples, p. 35), 'the three different suppositions re- 
specting the origin of things turn out to be literally 
unthinkable,' what does he mean by asserting that a 
Creative Power is the one great Reality ? Mr. Spen- 
cer seems to suggest that, though all idea of First 
Cause, of Creator, of Absolute Existence is unthink- 
able, the difficulty in the way of predicating them of 
anything is got over by asserting that the unthink- 
able and the unknowable is the ultimate reality. 
He said (First Principles, p. 110), ' every supposition 
respecting the genesis of the Universe commits us to 
alternative impossibilities of thought;' and again, 
4 we are not permitted to know — nay, we are not 
even permitted to conceive — that Reality which is 
behind the veil of Appearance.' Quite so ! On that 
ground we have long rested firmly, accepting Mr. 
Spencer's teaching. It is to violate that rule if we 
now go on to call it Creative Power, Ultimate Cause, 
and the rest. It comes then to this : Mr. Spencer 
says to the theologians, ' I cannot allow you to speak 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 103 

of a First Cause, or a Creator, or an All-Being, or an 
Absolute Existence, because you mean something 
intelligible and conceivable by these terms, and I tell 
you that they stand for ideas that are unthinkable 
and inconceivable. But,' he adds, ' I have a perfect 
right to talk of an Ultimate Cause, and a Creative 
Power, and an Absolute Existence, and an All-Being, 
because I mean nothing by these terms — at least, 
nothing that can be either thought of or conceived 
of, and I know that I am not talking of anything in- 
telligible or conceivable. That is the faith of an 
Agnostic, which except a man believe faithfully he 
cannot be saved.' 

Beyond the region of the knowable and the con- 
ceivable we have no right to assume an infinite 
energy more than infinite series of energies, or an in- 
finite series of infinite things or nothings. We have 
no right to assume one Ultimate Cause, or any cause, 
more than an infinite series of Causes, or something 
which is not Cause at all. We have no right to as- 
sume that anything beyond the knowable is eternal 
or infinite, or anything else ; we have no right to as- 
sume that it is the Ultimate Reality. There may be 
an endless circle of Realities, or there may be no 
Reality at all. Once leave the region of the know- 
able and the conceivable, and every positive asser- 
tion is unwarranted. The forms of our consciousness 
prove to us, says Mr. Spencer, that what lies behind 
the region of consciousness is not merely unknown 
but unknowable, that it is one, and that it is Real. 
The laws of mind, I reply, do not hold good in the 



104 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

region of the unthinkable ; the forms of our con- 
sciousness cannot limit the Unknowable. All posi- 
tive assertions about that 4 which cannot be brought 
within the forms of our finite thought ' are therefore 
unphilosophical. We have always held this of the 
theological Creation, and we must hold it equally of 
the evolutionist Creation. Here is the difference be- 
tween Positive Philosophy and Agnostic Metaphy- 
sics. 

But if this Realism of the Unknowable offends 
against sound philosophy, the Worship of the Un- 
knowable is abhorrent to every instinct of genuine 
Religion. There is something startling in Mr. Spen- 
cer's assertion that he 'is not concerned to show 
what effect this religious sentiment will have as a 
moral agent.' As in First Principles, so now, he 
represents the business of Religion to be to keep 
alive the consciousness of a Mystery. The recogni- 
tion of this supreme verity has been from the first, 
he says, the vital element of Religion. From the 
beginning it has dimly discerned this ultimate verity ; 
and that supreme and ultimate verity is, that there 
is an inscrutable Mystery. If this be not retrogres- 
sive Religion, what is ? Religion is not indeed to be 
discarded ; but, in its final and perfect form, all that 
it ever has had of reverence, gratitude, love, and 
sympathy is to be shrivelled up into the recognition 
of a Mystery. Morality, duty, goodness are no long- 
er to be within its sphere. It will neither touch the 
heart of men nor mould the conduct ; it will perpet- 
ually remind the intelligence that there is a, great 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 105 

Enigma, which, it tells us, can never be solved. Not 
only is religion reduced to a purely mental sphere, 
but its task in that sphere is one practically imbe- 
cile. 

Mr. Spencer complains that I called his Unknowa- 
ble ' an ever-present conundrum to be everlastingly 
given up.' But he uses words almost exactly the 
same ; he himself speaks of ' the Great Enigma which 
he (man) knows cannot be solved.' The business of 
the religious sentiment is with ' a consciousness of a 
Mystery that cannot be fathomed.' It would be 
difficult to find for Religion a lower and more idle 
part to play in human life than that of continually 
presenting to man a conundrum, which he is told he 
must continually give up. One would take all this 
to be a bit from Alice in Wonderland rather than the 
first chapter of Synthetic Philosophy. 

I turn to some of the points on which Mr. Spencer 
thinks that I misunderstand or misrepresent his 
meaning. I cannot admit any one of these cases. In 
calling the Unknowable a pure negation, I spoke 
from the standpoint of Religion, not of Metaphysics. 
It may be a logical postulate, but that of which we 
can know nothing, and of which we can form no con- 
ception, I shall continue to call a pure negation, as an 
object of worship, even if I am told (as I now am) 
that it is ' that by which all things are created and 
sustained.' Such is the view of Sir James Stephen, 
and of every other critic who has joined in this dis- 
cussion. 

With respect to Dean Mansel I made no mistake ; 



106 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

the mistake is Mr. Spencer's — not mine. I said that 
of all modern theologians the Dean came the nearest 
to him. As we all know, in First Principles Mr. 
Spencer quotes and adopts four pages from Mansel's 
Bampton Lectures. But I said ' there is a gulf which 
separates even his all-negative deity from Mr. 
Spencer's impersonal, unconscious, unthinking, and 
unthinkable Energy.' Mr. Spencer says that I mis- 
represent him and transpose his doctrine and Man- 
sel's, because he regards the Absolute as positive and 
the Dean regarded it as negative. If Mr. Spencer 
will look at my words again, he will see that I was 
speaking of Mansel's Theology, not of his Ontology. 
I said ' deityj not the Absolute. Mansel, as a meta- 
physician, no doubt spoke of the Absolute as nega- 
tive, whilst Mr. Spencer speaks of it as positive. But 
Mansel's idea of deity is personal, whilst Mr. Spen- 
cer's Energy is not personal. That is strictly accu- 
rate. Dean Mansel's words are, 'it is our duty to 
think of God as personal ; ' Mr. Spencer's words are, 
4 duty requires us neither to affirm nor deny person- 
ality ' of the Unknown Cause. That is to say, the 
Dean called his First Cause God ; Mr. Spencer pre- 
fers to call it Energy. Both describe this First Cause 
negatively ; but whilst the Dean calls it a Person, 
Mr. Spencer will not say that it is person, conscious, 
or thinking. Mr. Spencer's impression then that I 
misrepresented him in this matter is simply his own 
rather hasty reading of my words. 

It is quite legitimate^ in a question of religion and 
an object of worship to speak of this Unknowable 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 107 

Energy, described as Mr. Spencer describes it, as 
4 impersonal, unconscious, unthinking, and unthinka- 
ble.' The distinction that, since we neither affirm 
nor deny of it personality, consciousness, or thought, 
it is not therefore impersonal, is a metaphysical sub- 
tlety. That which cannot be presented in terms of 
human consciousness is neither personal, conscious, 
nor thinking, but properly unthinkable. To the or- 
dinary mind it is a logical formula, it is apart from 
man, it is impersonal and unconscious. And to tell 
us that this conundrum is 'the power which mani- 
fests itself in consciousness,' that man and the world 
are but its products and manifestations, that it may 
have (for aught we know) something higher than 
personality and something grander than intelligence, 
is to talk theologico-metaplrysical jargon, but it is 
not to give the average man and woman any positive 
idea at all, and certainly not a religious idea. In re- 
ligion, at any rate, that which can only be described 
by negations is negative ; that which cannot be pre- 
sented in terms of consciousness is unconscious. 

I shall say but little about Mr. Spencer's Ghost 
theory as the historical source of all religion ; because 
it is, after all, a subordinate matter, and would lead 
to a wide digression. I am sorry that he will not 
accept my (not very serious) invitation to him to 
modify the paradoxes thereon to be read in his Princi- 
ples of Sociology. I have always held it to be one of 
the most unlucky of all his sociologic doctrines, and 
that on psychological as well as on historical grounds. 
Mr. Spencer asserts that all forms of religious senti- 



108 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

ment spring from the primitive idea of a disembodied 
double of a dead man. I assert that this is a rather 
complicated and developed form of thought ; and 
that the simplest and earliest form of religious senti- 
ment is the idea of the rudest savage, that visible ob- 
jects around him — animal, vegetable, and inorganic — 
have quasi- human feelings and powers, which he re- 
gards with gratitude and awe. . Mr. Spencer says that 
man only began to worship a river or a volcano when 
he began to imagine them as the abode of dead men's 
spirits. I say that he began to fear or adore them 
so soon as he thought the river or the volcano had 
the feelings and powers of living beings; and that 
was from the dawn of the human intelligence. The 
latter view is, I maintain, far the simpler and more 
obvious explanation ; and it is a fault in logic to con- 
struct a complicated explanation when a simple one 
answers the facts. Animals think inert things of a 
peculiar form to be animal ; so do infants. The dog 
barks at a shadow ; the horse dreads a steam-engine ; 
the baby loves her doll, feeds her, nurses her, and 
buries her. The savage thinks the river, or the 
mountain beside which he lives, the most beneficent, 
awful, powerful of beings. There is the germ of re- 
ligion. To assure us that the savage has no feeling 
of awe and affection for the river and the mountain 
until he has evolved the elaborate idea of disembod- 
ied spirits of dead men dwelling invisibly inside 
them, is as idle as it would be to assure us that the 
love and the terror of the dog, the horse, and the 
baby are due to their perceiving some disembodied 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 109 

spirit inside the shadow, the steam-engine, or the 
doll. 

I think it a little hard that I may not hold this 
common-sense view of the matter, along with almost 
all who have studied the question, without being 
told that it comes of 'persistent thinking along 
defined grooves,' and that I should accept the Ghost 
theory of Religion were it not for my fanatical disci- 
pleship. Does not Mr. Spencer himself persistently 
think along defined grooves ; and does not every 
sj'stematic thinker do the same ? But it so happens 
that the Ghost theory leads to conclusions that out- 
rage common sense. If Dr. Tylor has finally 
adopted it, I am sorry. But it is certain that the 
believers in the Ghost theory as the origin of all 
forms of Religion are few and far between. The 
difficulties in the way of it are enormous. Mr. 
Spencer laboriously tries to persuade us that the 
worship of the Sun and the Moon arose, not from 
man's natural reverence for these great and beautiful 
powers of Nature, but solely as they were thought to 
be the abodes of the disembodied spirits of dead 
ancestors. Animal worship, tree and plant worship, 
fetich ism, the Confucian worship of heaven, all, he 
would have us believe, take their origin entirely 
from the idea that these objects contain the spirits of 
the dead. If this is not 'persistent thinking along 
defined grooves,' I know not what it is. 

The case of China is decisive. There we have a 
religion of vast antiquity and extent, perfectly clear 
and well ascertained. It rests entirely on worship 



110 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

of Heaven, and Earth, and objects of Nature, regard- 
ed as organized beings, and not as the abode of 
human spirits. There is in the religion and philosophy 
of China no notion of human spirits, disembodied 
and detached from the dead person, conceived as 
living in objects and distinct from dead bodies. The 
dead are the dead ; not the spiritual denizens of 
other things. In the face of this, the vague language 
of missionaries and travellers as to the beliefs of 
savages must be treated with caution. Mr. Spencer 
speaks in too confident language of his having 
'proved' and 'disproved' and 'shown' all these 
things in his Descriptive Sociology and in his Princi- 
ples of Sociology. How many competent persons has 
he convinced? Assuredly, for my part, I read and 
re-read all that he there says about the genesis of 
religion with amazement. We read these authorities 
for ourselves, and we cannot see that they bear out 
his conclusions. It was a pity to refer to the tables 
in the Descriptive Sociology, perhaps the least suc- 
cessful of all Mr. Spencer's works. That work is a 
huge file of cuttings from various travellers of all 
classes, extracted by three gentlemen whom Mr. 
Spencer employed. Of course these intelligent 
gentlemen had little difficulty in clipping from hun- 
dreds of books about foreign races sentences which 
seem to support Mr. Spencer's doctrines. The whole 
proceeding is too much like that of a famous lawyer 
who wrote a law-book, and then gave it to his pupils 
to find the ' cases ' which supported his law. It is a 
little suspicious that we find so often at the head of 



FREDERIC HARRISON. Ill 

each * superstition ' of the lower races a heading in 
almost the same words to the effect: — 'Dreams, 
regarded as visits from the spirits of departed rela- 
tions.' The intelligent gentlemen employed have 
done their work very well ; but of course one can find 
in this medley of tables almost any view. And I find 
facts which make for my view as often as any other. 

Fetichism, says Mr. Spencer, is not found in the 
lowest races. Be that as it may, it is found wherever 
we can trace the germs of religion. Well ! I read in 
the Descriptive Sociology that Mr. Burton, perhaps 
the most capable of all African travellers, declares 
that ' fetichism is still the only faith known in East 
Africa.' In other places, we read of the sun and 
moon, forests, trees, stones, snakes, and the like 
regarded with religious reverence by the savages of 
Central Africa. ' The Damaras attribute the origin 
of the sheep to a large stone.' They regard a big 
tree as the origin of Damaras. ' Cattle of a certain 
color are venerated by the Damaras.' c To the 
Bechuanas rain appears as the giver of all good.' 
'The negro whips or throws away a worthless fetich.' 
4 The Hottentots and Bushmen shoot poisoned arrows 
at the lightning and throw old shoes at it.' Ex- 
actly ! And do these Damaras, Bechuanas, and 
Bushmen do this solely because they think that the 
sun and moon, the lightning, the rain, the trees, the 
cattle, and the snakes are the abodes of the disem- 
bodied spirits of their dead relatives ? And do they 
never do this until they have evolved a developed 
Ghost theory ? 



112 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

This is more than I can accept, for all the robust- 
ness of faith which Mr. Spencer attributes to me. 
Whilst I find in a hundred books that countless races 
of Africa and the organized religion of China attrib- 
ute human qualities to natural objects, and grow up 
to regard those objects with veneration and awe, I 
shall continue to think that fetichism, or the reverent 
ascription of feeling and power to natural objects, is 
a spontaneous tendency of the human mind. And I 
shall refuse, even on Mr. Spencer's high authority, 
and that of his three compilers, to believe that it is 
solely a result of a developed Ghost theory. To ask 
us to believe this as ' proved ' on the strength of a 
pile of clippings made to order is, I think, quite as 
droll to ordinary minds as anything Mr. Spencer can 
pick up out of the Positivist Calendar. 

II. 

I pass now to consider the fifteen pages of Mr. 
Spencer's article in which he attacks the writings of 
Auguste Comte. And I begin by pointing out that 
this was not at all the issue between us, so that this 
attack savors of the device known to lawyers as 
'prejudice,' or 'abusing the plaintiff's attorney.' I 
gave reasons for thinking that the Unknowable could 
never be the foundation of a Creed. I added, in 
some twenty lines at most, that Humanity could be. 
Throughout my article I did not refer to Comte. 
My argument was entirely independent of any relig- 
ious ordinances whatever, whether laid down by 



i 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 113 

Comte or any one else. Mr. Mill, in his work on 
Comte, has emphatically asserted that Humanity is 
an idea pre-eminently fitted to be the object of relig- 
ion. And very many powerful minds agree with 
Mr. Mill so far, though they do not accept the or- 
ganized form of religion as Auguste Comte conceived 
it. To what degree, and in what sense, I may accept 
it, is not doubtful ; for I have striven for years past 
to make it known in my public utterances. But, 
until I put forward Auguste Comte as an infallible 
authority, until I preach or practise everything laid 
down in the Positive Polity, it is hardly an answer 
to me in a philosophical discussion to jest for the 
fiftieth time about Comte's arrogance, or about the 
banners to be used in the solemn processions, or about 
addressing prayer to 'holy' Humanity. My friends 
and I address no prayers to Humanity as 'holy' or 
otherwise ; we use no banners, and we never speak 
of Comte as Mahometans speak of Mahomet, or as 
Buddhists speak of Buddha. For my own part, I am 
continually saying, and I say it deliberately now, 
that I look upon very much that Comte threw out 
for the future as tentative and purely Utopian. Since 
I have held this language for many years in public, 
I do not think that Mr. Spencer is justified in 
describing me as a blind devotee. And when he 
parries a criticism of his own philosophy, by ridicul- 
ing practices and opinions for which I have never 
made myself responsible, I hardly think he is acting 
with the candid mind which befits the philosopher 
in all tilings. 



114 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

For this reason I shall not trouble myself about 
the ' eccentricities' which he thinks he can discover 
in the writings of Comte. A thousand eccentricities 
in Comte would not make it reasonable in Spencer to 
worship the Unknowable ; and it would be hard in- 
deed to match the eccentricity of venerating as the 
sole Reality that of which we only know that we can 
know nothing and imagine nothing. But there are 
other good reasons for declining to discuss with Mr. 
Spencer the writings of Comte. The first is that he 
knows nothing whatever about them. To Mr. Spen- 
cer the writings of Comte are, if not the Absolute 
Unknowable, at any rate the Absolute Unknown. I 
have long endeavored to persuade Mr. Spencer to 
study Comte, all the more as he owes to him so much 
indirectly through others. But, so far as I know, I 
have not induced him to do so. And his recent criti- 
cisms of these writings show the same thing. They 
add nothing, I may say, to the criticism contained in 
the work of Mr. Mill, or indeed to the obvious witti- 
cisms to be read any week in the Saturday Review. 
To turn over the pages of the Positive Polity and 
find many things which seem paradoxical is an exer- 
cise easy enough ; but to grasp the conceptions of 
Comte, or indeed of any philosopher, seriously, is 
labor of a different kind. 

Nothing is easier than to make cheap ridicule of 
any philosopher whatever. The philosopher neces- 
sarily works in a region of high abstraction, and 
largely employs the resources of deduction. He is 
bound by his office to deal freely with wide generaliza- 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 115 

tions ; and to follow his principles across all appar- 
ent obstacles. Every philosopher accordingly falls 
from time to time into astounding paradoxes ; he is 
always accused by the superficial of arrogance ; by 
the wits of absurdity ; by the public of blindness. 
It is the fate of philosophers ; and the charges, it 
must be allowed, are often founded in reason. Des- 
cartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Hegel, may in turn be at- 
tacked for certain hypotheses of theirs as the most 
arrogant of men and the wildest of sophists. How 
often has Mr. Spencer shared the same fate ! There 
are those who think that no other living man has 
ever ventured on assertions at once so dogmatic and 
so paradoxical. I have too much respect for Mr. 
Spencer to quote any one of these wonderful bits of 
philosophic daring. I recognize in him a real phi- 
losopher of a certain order, and I seek to understand 
his system as a whole ; nor am I dismayed in my 
studies by a thousand things in his theories, which 
certainly do seem to me very hard sayings. Mr. 
Spencer has himself just published a very remarkable 
work, ' the Man versus the State ; ' to which he 
hardly expects to make a convert except here and 
there, and about which an unfriendl}' critic might say 
that it might be entitled 'Mr. Spencer against All 
England.' I shall not certainly criticise him for that. 
But it is a signal instance of the isolated position as- 
sumed from time to time by philosophers. Philoso- 
phers who live, not so much in 'glass houses' as in 
very crystal palaces of their own imagination, of 
all people, one would think, should give up the 



116 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

pastime of throwing stones at their neighbors' con- 
structions. 

I give an instance of the way in which Mr. Spen- 
cer misunderstands Comte. Mr. Spencer speaks of 
Comte's Historical Calendar as a i canonization,' as 
a list of ' saints,' to be ' worshipped ' day by day, as 
a means of ' regulating posterity,' and as part of the 
4 deification' of Humanity. And he further repre- 
sents this list of historical names as a strictly classi- 
fied selection of men in degree of personal merit. 
Now every part of this view is an error. So far from 
this calendar being permanently imposed on pos- 
terity, Comte himself speaks of it as provisional, to 
serve a temporary purpose. And what is that pur- 
pose? Why, to impress on the mind the general 
course of human civilization. Comte calls it 4 a con- 
crete view of man's history.' It is not meant to be 
a classification in real order of merit. It is not essen- 
tially personal at all. The names are given and al- 
ways spoken of as ' types,' concrete embodiments of 
manifold elements in the civilization of the past. 
Over and over again Comte says that the type and 
its place are often chosen without reference to per- 
sonal merit to represent a class, a nation, or a move- 
ment. They are not called, or treated of as ' saints.' 
There is no ' canonization,' no 4 worship,' no ascrip- 
tion of perfection, or absolute merit of any kind. 
The whole scheme from beginning to end is, what 
Comte calls it, a concrete view of man's history, a 
mode of impressing on the minds of modern men 
what they owe in so many ways to men in the past. 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 117 

The exigencies of a calendar, with its months, weeks, 
and days, preclude any real classification of merit ; nor 
is any such thing attempted. It is a mode of teach- 
ing history, using the artifice of associating the names 
of certain famous men with months, weeks, and days. 
And the object is to impress on the mind the multi- 
plicity of the forces and elements which make up- 
civilization. To suppose that all names which oc- 
cupy similar places represent men of exactly equal 
merit is a gratuitous piece of absurdity introduced 
into a fine conception. Even in the Church Calen- 
dar there is St. Paul's Day and St. Swithin's Day, 
though no one supposes that St. S within is regarded 
as the equal of St. Paul. But Comte's Historical 
Calendar has no analogy with the Catholic Calendar 
at all. It is a concrete view of history, intended to 
commemorate the sum of human civilization. 1 

I shall certainly not enter into any defence of it. 
It seems to me the best synthetic scheme of history 
which has ever been constructed on a single page. 

i A single example may show with how little care Mr. Spencer 
looked at Comte. He complains that Comte should put Bichat 
above Newton, because he finds that Bichat heads a month in the 
Calendar, and Newton a week. Now, Comte never instituted any 
personal comparison between Newton and Bichat. But he explained 
that for the last month, which represents the course of modern sci- 
ence, he must choose a biologist and not a mathematician, on the 
ground of the superior importance of Biology. The Calendar was 
constructed more than thirty years ago, when certainly a thoroughly 
adequate type of Biology was not quite accessible. For grounds 
fully explained he chose Bichat. Newton takes his place with the 
mathematicians ; but any idea that Bichat's intellect was superior 
to Newton's has not the smallest authority in anything said by 
Comte. 



118 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

But I am far from supposing it perfect, nor ao I 
doubt that it might easily be amended or revised. 
Mr. Spencer seems astounded that Cyrus and God- 
frey, Terence and Juvenal, Froissart and Palissy, 
should hold in it the places they do. To discuss that 
question would involve a long historical argument, 
and I am not at all disposed to enter into any histor- 
ical argument with Mr. Spencer. With all his scien- 
tific learning, and his manifold gifts, Mr. Spencer is 
seldom regarded as having much to tell us within the 
historical field. It is here that his inferiority to 
Comte is most strikingly seen. Those who know the 
harmonious power with which Comte has called forth 
into life the vast procession of the ages can best judge 
how weak by his side Mr. Spencer appears. In Mr. 
Spencer's theory of history the past teaches little but 
a few Quaker-like maxims ; that it is very like a sav- 
age to fight, and that military activity and supersti- 
tion are the sources of all evil. Certainly Comte, as 
heartily as Spencer, has condemned the military spirit 
in this age, and the continuance of all fictitious be- 
liefs. But he is not so blind to facts that he does 
not recognize the historical uses of the military life 
in the past, and the beauty of many theological types. 
And thus it is that he feels honor for Godfrey the 
Crusader, as well as for Socrates the philosopher ; for 
the conquerors Cyrus and Sesostris, as well as for 
Penn the Quaker, and St. Paul the Apostle. 

There is a certain ' fallacy of the Den ' running 
through Mr. Spencer's historical notions, of which 
his article gives very striking examples. Possessed 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 119 

by nis theory of indefinite ' differentiation, the course 
of civilization presents itself to his mind as a perpet- 
ual development of new forces — progression in a 
constant series of divergent lines. According to this 
view of history, an institution, an idea, an energy 
which the civilization of to-day has abandoned is 
finally condemned ; to revive it under new forms, is 
retrogression. Since savages respected their ances- 
tors, it would be savage to respect our ancestors. 
Since we have been tending, during the last two or 
three centuries, to lessen all temporal and spiritual 
influence on the individual, we must go on till we 
have reduced both to zero. Since war is inhuman, 
the qualities and habits which the military life 
promoted are equally abominable. To revive any- 
thing which modern society has discarded is retro- 
gression. For the test with Mr. Spencer is not 
whether it is relatively good or bad for man, but is 
found in the fact of Evolution absolutely. 

Now, this error affects all that Mr. Spencer says 
about the history of civilization. The truth is, as 
Comte has so wonderfully shown, the story of man's 
development is a tale of continued revival, recon- 
struction, and fresh adjustments of social life. Old 
habits, thoughts, and energies spring into a new life, 
under altered forms, and in new co-ordination. De- 
velopment means not indefinite differentiation, but 
continuous growth, with organic re-adjustment of the 
organism to its environment. And that organic re- 
adjustment is constantly demanding the renewal of 
dormant elements, and the new uses of old things. I 



120 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

should be sorry to think that Humanity were for ever 
condemned to lose everything which the taste of this 
somewhat cynical, material and democratic generation 
is pleased to throw off. The phrase Retrogressive 
Religion does not frighten me at all. Any religion 
that the Future of Man is to have will be retrogres- 
sive in this sense ; that it will revive something of re- 
ligious feelings which were once more active in the 
world than they happen to be to-day. Whether an 
enthusiastic regard for the welfare of our human race 
be retrogressive religion or not I care little. I should 
have thought it to be a new and a progressive type 
of creed, more so than the worship of the Ultimate 
Cause, and the Creative Power, and the All-Being ; 
where I find, indeed (and where the Christian World 
finds also), retrogression into Metaphysic and The- 
ology. 

III. 

I turn now to the question — if Humanity be an 
adequate object of religion ? — a question, as I say, 
independent of the forms in which Comte proposed 
to constitute it. Mr. Mill, with all his hostility to 
Positivism, asserted emphatically that it was ; and he 
went so far as to say that every other type of relig- 
ion would be the better in so far as it approached 
the religion of Humanity. And first let us note that 
Mr. Spencer has given a quite exaggerated sense to 
what we mean by Religion and Humanity, by attach- 
ing to these ideas theological associations. The same 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 121 

thing is done by Sir James Stephen, and by all our 
theological critics. Mr. Spencer asks, What are the 
claims of Humanity to 'Godhood'? Sir James Ste- 
phen talks of ' Mr. Harrison's God,' of ; the shadow 
of a God,' and he says he would as soon ' worship ' 
the ugliest idol in India as the human race. All this 
is to foist in theological ideas where none are sug- 
gested by us. Humanity is neither the shadow of 
God nor the substitute for God, nor has it any anal- 
ogy with God. Xo one claims any ' godhood ' for 
humanity, or any perfection of any kind. We do 
not ask any one to ' worship ' it, as Hindoos worship 
idols, or as Christians worship God or the Virgin. If 
it misleads people, I am quite willing to speak hu- 
manity with a small 'h,' or not to use the word at 
all. I am quite content to speak of the human 
race, if that makes things clearer ; I am ready to 
give up the word ' worship,' if that is a stumbling- 
block, and to speak of showing affection and rever- 
ence. If people mean by religion going down on 
their knees and invoking a supernatural being, I will 
wait till the word ' religion ' has lost these associa- 
tions. 

The very purpose of the Positive Scheme is to sat- 
isfy rational people that, though the ecstatic ' wor- 
ship ' of supernatural divinities has come to an end, 
intelligent love and respect for our human brother- 
hood will help us to do our duty in life. So stated, 
the proposition is almost a truism ; it is undoubtedly 
the practical conviction of millions of good people, 
and, as it seems, is that of Sir James Stephen. In 



122 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

plain words, the Religion of Humanity means recog- 
nizing your duty to your fellow man on human 
grounds. This is the sum and substance of that 
which it pleases some critics and some philosophers 
to represent as a grotesque delusion. Whatever is 
grotesque in the idea is derived from the extrava- 
gance with which they themselves distort that idea. 
I have no wish to i worship ' Humanity in any other 
sense than as a man may worship his own father and 
mother. A good man feels affection and reverence 
for his father and his mother ; he can cultivate that 
feeling and make it the spring of conduct. And the 
feeling is not destroyed by his finding that his father 
and mother had the failings of men and women. 
Something of the affection, and more of the sense of 
brotherhood, which a man feels towards his own par- 
ents, he feels towards his family ; not a little of it 
even to his home, his city, or his province, and much 
of it towards his country. Every good and active 
man recognizes the tie that binds him to a widening 
series of groups of his kinsmen and fellow men. In 
that feeling there are elements of respect, elements 
of affection, and elements of devotion, in certain de- 
grees. That sense of respect, affection, and devo- 
tion can be extended wider than country. It can be 
extended, I say, as far as the human race itself. And 
since patriotism does not stop with our actual con- 
temporaries, but extends to the memories and the fu- 
ture of our countrymen, so, I maintain, our feeling 
for the human race must include what it has been, 
as well as what it is to be. That is all that I mean 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 123 

by the religion of humanity. What is there of i gro- 
tesque,' of the ugliest of Hindoo idols, and all the 
rest of it, in so commonplace an opinion ? 

All good and even all decent men about us daily 
order their lives under a more or less effective sense 
of their social duties. The}' live more or less for 
their wives, their children, their parents, their family. 
I do not deny that they live largely for themselves 
also : but with good men and good women the two 
strands of motive are beautifully bound in one. And 
the better the man, the more close is the harmony 
between his social and his personal life. Outside 
their family, men have other strong ties of duty and 
of regard for definite social groups. They will do 
much for their friends, their party, their profession, 
their church, their academy, their class, their city, 
their country. It is disgraceful to proclaim one's self 
indifferent to these claims : to refuse to make any 
sacrifice for them, to deny that we owe them any- 
thing, or that we feel any regard for them. There is 
nothing very heroic about all this in the average ; 
and it is always more or less mixed up with personal 
motives. But in the main it is good and wholesome, 
and bears noble witness to the marvellous social 
nature of man. Xow I do not say that this in itself 
is religion. But I mean by religion this sense of so- 
cial duty, pushed to its full extent, strengthened by 
a sound view of human nature, and warmed by the 
glow of imagination and sympathy. It has been said 
in a vague way that religion is ' morality touched by 
emotion.' The religion of Humanity, as I conceive 



124 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

it, is simply morality fused ivith social devotion, and 
enlightened by sound philosophy. 

Yet men who are known to live under a practical 
sense of their social duties, men who would be 
ashamed to profess total unconcern for father, mother, 
wife and child, friends and fellow citizens, are not 
ashamed to exhaust the terms of opprobrium for the 
collective notion of humanity ; which after all is only 
made up of a multitude of fathers, mothers, wjves, 
children, friends, fellow citizens, and fellow men. 
Mr. Spencer's whole life (as his friends know even 
better than the world) has been one of unfaltering 
devotion to his great mistress Philosophy, worthy to 
compare with any in the roll of the i lovers of wis- 
dom.' Sir James Stephen is no less widely known, 
not only for his indefatigable public services, but for 
his hearty private character ; a devoted public ser- 
vant, who, it is said, sentences even the worst crimi- 
nal ' gently, as if he loved him,' under a strong sense 
of public duty. Yet these eminent men, whose en- 
tire lives are filled with social, rather than personal, 
energy, have no words strong enough for (controver- 
sial purposes) to express their contempt for the human 
race. Mankind, says Mr. Spencer, is 'a bubble,' ' a 
dull leaden-hued thing.' Sir James Stephen says it is 
4 a stupid, ignorant half-beast of a creature ; ' and he 
would as soon worship the ugliest Hindoo idol, before 
which the natives chop off the heads of goats. Why, 
this is the raving of Timon of Athens ! These men 
are not cynics, but merely philosophers attacking an 
opponent. To my mind all this is sheer nonsense. 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 125 

Men, known to be generous and self-clevoted in every 
duty of social life, are not believed when they utter 
tirades of this kind against mankind and human 
nature. 

If the human race be ' a half-beast of a creature,' 
if it be this dismal ' bubble,' what else or what better 
have we ? Why should they, or any man, waste lives 
of effort in its "service ; what is the worth of any- 
thing generous, ' humane, and social? Humanity, I 
say, is nothing but the sum of all the forces of indi- 
vidual men and women ; and if it be this mere bub- 
ble and half-beast, the men and women that make it 
up, and the human feelings and forces which have 
created it, must be equally worthy of our loathing 
and contempt. In that case our only philosophy is a 
malignant pessimism, exceeding anything ever at- 
tempted in misanthropy before. I am no optimist ; 
and I certainly see no ' godhood ' in the human race. 
I am as much alive to the vice and weakness of the 
human race as any one. But I feel, in common with 
the great majority of sound-hearted men, that there 
is a great deal of human nature in the human race, 
and that of good human nature ; that the good 
abundantly predominates, and that the great story of 
human progress is on the whole a worthy and an in- 
spiring record. At any rate, this planet, and, so far 
as we know, this Universe, has nothing (in the moral 
sphere) which is more worthy and more inspiring of 
hope. Nee viget cpiidquam simile, aut secundum. Di- 
vinities, and Absolute Goodnesses, and Absolute Pow- 
ers have ended for us. The relative goodness and 



126 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

power of our race remains a solid reality. It is bone 
of our bone, and flesh of our flesh ; the stuff whereof 
our mothers, and our fathers, our sons and our 
friends, our fellow citizens are made ; whereof are 
made all who with us and beside us are striving to 
live a humane life. 

I will not do my friends the injustice of supposing 
that any regard for men which they acknowledge is 
confined to their own belongings and circles, and that 
for the rest of mankind they feel (what they assert) 
supreme contempt and dislike. Their words would 
suggest it. To Mr. Spencer Europe presents nothing 
but the revolting prospect of c a hundred millions of 
Pagans masquerading as Christians.' Sir James 
Stephen says that a majority of the human race can- 
not read, and devote their time to nothing but daily 
labor. Are they mere beasts for that? Some of the 
greatest and best of men could not read ; some of 
the noblest natures on earth are spent in the hovel 
and the garret of the poor. It is the task of the 
religion of Humanity to correct such anti-social 
thoughts, the besetting sin of the philosopher and 
the man of power. It will teach their pride that the 
nobility of human nature is to be found chiefly in 
the cottage and the workshop ; where the untaught 
mother is lavishing on her children unutterable 
wealth of tenderness; where the patient toiler is 
subduing the earth that for the common good wise 
men may have an earth whereon to think out the 
truth, and the poet and the artist may have materials 
to satisfy us all with beauty. 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 127 

Comte, of all men, did not choose out five hun- 
dred names to be 'worshipped ' as ' saints,' devoting the 
five hundred millions to oblivion. He taught us to 
see the greatness of human nature in the love and 
courage of the ignorant, as well as in the genius and 
the mio'ht of the hero. And when we think of 
Humanity our minds are not set on a band of the 
'elect' but on the millions who people this earth 
and subdue it, leaving each century on the whole a 
richer inheritance in comfort, in thought, in virtue ; 
— millions not in the civilized world only, but in the 
rude plains of Asia, and of Africa, where the Hindoo 
struggles to rear an honest household in his plot of 
rice-field, and the Fellah yields to the will of Heaven 
with sublime patience, whilst retaining uncrushed his 
human heart. Assuredly it is no ' godhood ' that we 
see there, no pride of human reason, no millennium, 
or transfiguration of man. But it is human nature, 
sound down to its depths ; rich with unfathomable 
love wherever there is a mother and a child, and 
rich with undying courage wherever there is the 
father of an honest and thriving household. 

But it is not the present generation which absorbs 
our thought. Mankind, as we see it to-day, is nei- 
ther god-like nor very sublime. But the story of 
human progress during fifty centuries, from the ' half- 
beast' that it once was in the pre-historic ages down 
to the ideal civilization which we surely foresee in 
the far-off ages to come — this is sublime. Or, if not 
sublime in the way in which the fairy-tale of Para- 
dise, or the Creation of the Universe, is sublime, it is 



128 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

still the most splendid tale of moral development of 
which we have any certain record. I am not at 
all disenchanted when I am reminded of the sav- 
agery, the bestiality, or even the cannibalism of man's 
early career. There were noble savages even in the 
Palaeolithic ages, and even the earliest type of man 
was superior in something, I suppose, to contempo- 
rary types of the age. But such as he was I accept 
him as the ancestor of the human race, to whom it 
owes its first beginning. The glory of Humanity is 
not lost, in that it was once so low, but lies in that, 
beginning so low, it is now so high. 

It is for this reason that Comte has insisted so 
much on the Past, and the religious value of a true 
conception of human civilization. It shocks Mr. 
Spencer to look with anything but horror on our 
fighting and savage forefathers. But, such as they 
were, they made civilization possible. And the grand- 
eur of human civilization as a whole can only be 
realized in the mind when it constantly dwells on the 
enormous record of its progress from the half-bestial 
beginnings out of which it has slowly arisen by in- 
calculable efforts and hopes. Still, it is a record of 
much failure, of shortcomings at the best. And for 
this reason Positivism dwells quite as much in the 
Future as in the Past. Endless progress towards a 
perfection never, perhaps, to be reached, but to be 
ideally cherished in hope, a hope which every stroke 
of science and every line of history confirms to us, 
and with which every generous instinct of our nature 
beats in unison — such is the practical heaven Of our 






FREDERIC HARRISON. 129 

faith. As there is no godhood now in Humanity, so 
there is no Paradise in its future. Past, Present, 
and Future, all alike dwell on this earth ; on the 
facts of man's actual career in the dwelling-place 
that he has made for himself thereon. 

Mr. Spencer is himself far too much of a philoso- 
pher, and too much of a believer in moral progress, 
not to have a deep faith in this very march of civil- 
ization, of which Humanity, as I understand it, is at 
once product and author. He says himself : 'Surely 
civilized society, with its complex arrangements and 
involved processes, its multitudinous material prod- 
ucts and almost magical instruments, its language, 
science, literature, art, must be credited to some 
agency or other.' The words are not mine, but his. 
That is to say, the story of human civilization is a 
very noble record, demanding, as he admits, ' venera- 
tion and gratitude' somewhere. And in these words 
he throws to the winds ' the bubble,' and ' the dull 
leaden-hued thing,' ' the hundred million Pagans mas- 
querading,' 'the stupid, ignorant half-beast of a crea- 
ture,' as the judge calls it. The human race then is 
not the odious bubble ; on the contrary, the splendid 
story of human civilization must fill us with a sense 
of 'veneration and gratitude.' But by astonishing 
perversity, as it seems to me, by long habit of 'per- 
sistent thinking along defined grooves,' Mr. Spencer 
has nothing but contempt for the human race, and 
lavishes his 'veneration and gratitude,' called out by 
the sum of human civilization, upon his Unknowable 
and Inconceivable Postulate. This is to me to outdo 



130 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

the ingratitude of the theologians who find 'man only- 
vile,' and who ascribe every good thing in man's evil 
nature to an ineffable Being. Since Mr. Spencer 
agrees with me that ' veneration and gratitude,' for 
all that man has become, are due somewhere, I prefer 
to ascribe it to that human race, which we know and 
feel ; and which, so far as we can see, has fashioned 
its own destiny, in spite of tremendous obstacles in 
its environment ; rather than to a logician's formula, 
about which the logican himself tells us that he 
knows nothing and conceives nothing. 

Mr. Spencer has labored to prove that Humanity 
(which he himself has so admirably described as a 
real organism) is unconscious. He might have spared 
his pains. Neither Comte, nor any rational Positiv- 
ist, has ever regarded Humanity as conscious. And, 
for that reason, nothing jsvill induce me to address 
Humanity as a conscious being, or in any way what- 
ever to treat it as a Person. In that respect it stands 
on the same footing as Mr. Spencer's Unknowable, 
except that I say frankly that I have not the least 
reason to suppose Humanity to be conscious; whilst 
he will not say that his Unknowable may not be con- 
scious (as it might be a gooseberry or a parallelo- 
piped). And then Mr. Spencer goes on to argue 
that, since Humanity is not conscious, that concludes 
the matter ; ' for gratitude cannot be entertained 
towards something which is unconscious.' And b} r 
a really curious inconsistency he asserts that 'vene- 
ration and gratitude' are due towards the Unknowa- 
ble, which he has just told us cannot be conceived in 



FREDERIC HARBISON. 131 

terms of consciousness at all ! So that he will not 
let me feel any gratitude to the human race, my own 
kindred, because it is unconscious ; and he asks me to 
bestow it all on his unconscious, or non-conscious, or 
outside-of-all-consciousness Unknowable. 

Apart from this singular slip in logic, he says much 
about the unconsciousness of the human race which 
amazes me. Why cannot a man feel any gratitude 
towards that which is unconscious ? He tells us to 
examine our consciousness. Well ! Did all the grati- 
tude which he felt during life to his own parents, 
teachers, and benefactors cease at the instant of their 
death? I cannot find it in my consciousness. My 
gratitude to my parents is the same, living or dead ; 
and, if gratitude to one parent can be expressed and 
answered in words, whilst gratitude to the other lies 
but in the silent communing of the heart, I cannot 
find that the one gratitude differs from the other, 
save that this last is the deeper, more abiding feel- 
ing. And, if a man is unworthy of the name of man 
who can feel no gratitude to a parent or a benefac- 
tor, the moment they are laid cold in death, why can- 
not a man feel grateful to the school where he was 
trained, or the church wherein he was reared, or the 
country of his forefathers and his descendants? And 
by school, church, or country, I mean the men therein 
grouped, some known, some unknown, some by per- 
sonal contact, some by spiritual influence, by whose 
labor he has reaped and grown. 

Mr. Spencer goes further in the same line. Since 
the human race, he says, was unconscious whilst 



132 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

slowly evolving its own civilization, since the indi- 
vidual men and women were not consciously confer- 
ring any benefits on us, and very partially foresaw 
the result of their own labor, we owe them no grati- 
tude. They acted automatically or like coral-polyps 
by instinct, following their own natures, satisfying 
their own craving, and we owe them no more grati- 
tude than we owe to hogs for fattening, or to sheep, 
for growing woolly coats. Watt, according to this 
view, invented the steam-engine to make money 
or occupy his mind. Newton and Leibnitz toiled 
only for fame. If the poets and artists created 
beauty, it was because they liked beauty, and hoped 
for reward. I confess this seems to me to strike at 
the root of morality and all estimate whatever of 
human greatness and merit. A philosopher will tell 
us next that he owes no gratitude to the father who 
begat him, or the mother who nursed him ; for both 
were obeying instincts which they share with the 
lowest animals. If heroes, poets, and thinkers are 
mere automata, selfishly and blindly following in- 
stincts, like the polyps working their tentacles and 
thereby forming a coral reef, morality, and most of 
the moral qualities of man, are things which we can- 
not predicate of man at all. 

Man is no doubt a highly complex being, and his 
moral, intellectual, and physical natures are blended 
in marvellous ways. It was never pretended by the 
optimist that any man has acted uniformly on the 
noblest motives ; but it has never been asserted by 
the pessimist that he acts invariably on the vilest. 



FKEDERIC HARRISON. 133 

It is a mark of the meanest nature to refuse to 
acknowledge a benefit, on the ground that the bene- 
factor was not wholly absorbed with the wish to 
benefit, or entirely aware of the extent of his benefit. 
For my part, I refuse to measure out my sense of 
gratitude to my human benefactors, known or un- 
known, by so niggardly a rule. I trust that Raffaelle 
and Shakespeare did enjoy their work. But I love 
and admire the genius in which they revelled. Hu- 
manity is rich with gratitude to those who knew not 
the value of the services they were rendering, just as 
it is to those whose names and services are covered 
in the vast wave of time. What becomes of Patriot- 
ism, if it be open to us to sneer out that the men 
who fought our battles or made our country wanted 
nothing but money and fame? What becomes of 
family affection, if a man can tell his mother that 
bore him that if she reared children it was only what 
cats and rabbits do ? 

The religion of Humanity, as we understand it, is 
nothing but the idealized sum of those human feel- 
ings and duties which all decent men acknowledge 
in detail and in fact. All healthy morality, as well 
as all sound philosophy, shows us that the sum total 
of all this mass of life is good, and is tending towards 
better. As Mr. Spencer admits, civilized society as 
a whole must command ' admiration and gratitude ' 
somewhere. This being so, the sneers of philosophers 
and cynics may be left out of sight. I shall not 
follow Mr. Spencer in the wails of his Jeremiad over 
the folly and wickedness of his contemporaries. 



134 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

Millions, he says, still go to church and chapel, 
instead of studying Evolution and Differentiation, or 
praying to the Unknowable at home. At Eton and 
Harrow boys are taught to make Latin verses, and 
not the genesis of species. The House of Commons 
will not let Mr. Bradlaugh take his seat; and many 
still admire Lord Beaconsfield. Many people were 
sorry when young Bonaparte was killed by the 
Zulus; and they gave a dinner to Hobart Pasha. 
At a dinner in France, the ' army ' was given as a 
toast. And German students will fight duels. And 
for these reasons Mr. Herbert Spencer has a great 
contempt for his species. Risum teneatis, amici f I 
must treat this as a mere outburst of ill-humor. We 
all know that there is folly, vice, and misery enough 
in the world — and for that reason all absolute 
4 worship ' of any one or anything is out of the ques- 
tion. Strangely enough, Mr. Spencer, who finds this 
folly and vice preclude him from any respect for 
Humanity, does not see that it ought also to bar any 
' veneration and gratitude ' to the Unknowable ; to 
which he ascribes the honor of producing civilized 
society, in spite of all its shortcomings. For my part, 
I am not to be shaken in my belief that the sum of 
civilized society is relatively worthy of honor, by such 
melancholy facts as that Mr. Bradlaugh cannot get 
his seat, and that German students slit each others' 
noses. 

Mr. Spencer raises a great difficulty over the fact 
that there are, and have been, very evil people in the 
world, who cannot be included in the Humanity 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 135 

which we are to honor. 1 And lie asks why they are 
excluded from the notion. No one has worked out 
the organic unity and life of the Human Organism 
more clearly than Mr. Spencer himself. When we 
think and speak of that organism, we think and 
speak of those organs and elements which share in 
its organic life, and not of the excrescences, maladies, 
or excrement, so to speak, which it has finally elim- 
inated. Men have a warm regard for their family, 
though there may be a blackguard in it, for whom 
they have no regard at all. They feel loyalty to 
their profession or their party, though they know 
that it counts not a few black sheep. And patriotism 
is quite possible towards our countrymen past and 
present, though some of the worst men in history 
have been amongst them. We are justly proud of 
our English race; but when we speak of its achieve- 
ments we are not including in our honor King John, 
Guy Fawkes, and Titus Oates. If the existence of a 
minority of evil men makes it impossible to think of 
Humanity as a whole, or to honor it as a whole, the 
same argument would make it impossible to think of 
country as a whole, or to honor it as a whole. And 
this applies also to what Mr. Spencer calls ' civilized 
society.' 

1 He cannot reconcile Comte's definition of Humanity ' as the 
whole of human beings, past, present, and future,' with the state- 
ment that ' the word whole points out that you must not take in all 
men.' If Mr. Spencer would take some pains to understand Comte, 
he would see that the French word is ' ensemble ; ' that is to say, 
Humanity includes the sum of human civilization, but does not 
include every individual man, who may not have contributed at all 
to this ensemble or 'sum.' 



136 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

The analogies of Humanity are to be found with, 
such minor aggregates of civilized society as Family, 
Church, State, Country. It has no analogy at all 
with God, or divinity in any form. When Mr. Spen- 
cer says that we ; cleif}^ ' Humanity, it would be as 
just to say that he deifies Evolution. He thinks that 
Evolution is the key of our mental and moral Syn- 
thesis. I think that Humanity is. But as I do not 
suppose that he finds 'any claims to godhood' in 
Evolution, I beg him not to suppose that I find any 
in Humanity. If Family, Church, State, Country, 
are real aggregates, worthy of gratitude and respect, 
a fortiori, Humanity is a real aggregate, worthy of 
respect and gratitude. I cannot understand how the 
smaller aggregates can inspire us with any worthy 
sentiment at all, whilst the fuller aggregate of the 
Family of Mankind inspires nothing but contempt 
and aversion. 

A few words on the original idea put forth by Sir 
James Stephen. Suppose that it turns out, he says, 
there is no possible object of Religion left to man, 
cannot he do very well without Religion altogether? 
It is a view that is often secretly cherished by the 
comfortable, the strong, and the selfish ; but I am not 
aware that it has ever been calmly argued before as 
a contribution to the philosophy of religion. If his 
meaning be that we can do without adoration of any 
superhuman power, without believing anything to be 
above human science, or out of the range of human 
life, of course I wholly agree with him. And if he 
thinks that mankind will get on very well by means 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 137 

of human education, human morality, and the sense 
of practical duty to our fellow beings — then he is 
something of an unconscious Positivist himself, and 
no one will ask him to go on his knees to an abstract 
notion, or to go through any imitation of Christian 
or other theological practices which he may regard 
as mummery. For my part, I neither desire nor 
expect that Christian charity or Christian morality 
of any kind, will be preserved. It will be enlarged 
and solidified into human charity and human moral- 
ity. And adopting all that Sir James 1ms said there- 
on, I claim him as speaking on my side — as he 
certainly repudiates Mr. Spencer. 

But this human charity and human morality will 
never be established if the peculiar cynicism which 
Sir James affects about the human race were ever to 
prevail. He says most truly that 'love, friendship, 
good-nature, kindness, carried to the height of sincere 
and devoted affection, will always be the chief plea- 
sures of life, whether Christianity be true or false.' 
Comte himself never put it higher, and I am thinking 
of quoting this sentence as the text of my next dis- 
course at Newton Hall. But this will not be so — 
love, friendship, kindness, and devoted affection will 
not always be the chief pleasures of life — if philo- 
sophers succeed in persuading the world that the 
human race are a set of Yahoos. Sir James also sees 
that, apart from any theology whatever, the social 
nature of man will itself produce 'a solid, vigorous, 
useful kind of moral standard;' and he goes on to 
show that this morality will have a poetic side, will 



138 AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 

affect the imagination and the heart by becoming 
idealized, and issuing in enthusiasm as well as con- 
viction. O upright Judge ! O most learned Judge ! 
I ask no more than this. The Religion of Hu- 
manity means to me this solid, vigorous, useful moral 
standard, based on the belief that sincere and devoted 
affection is the chief pleasure of life, cultivated and 
idealized till it produces enthusiasm. Only I insist 
that it will need the whole force of education through 
life, all the resources which engender habits, stir the 
imagination, and kindle self-devotion, in order to 
keep this spirit alive in the masses of mankind. The 
cultivated, the thoughtful, and the well-to-do can 
nourish this solid morality in a cool, self-contained, 
sub-cynical way. But to soften and purify the masses 
of mankind we shall need all the passion and faith 
which are truly dignified by the name of religion — 
religious respect, religious sense of duty, religious 
belief in something vastly nobler and stronger than 
self. They will find this in the mighty tale of human 
civilization. They will never find it in the philoso- 
pher's hypothesis of an Infinite Unknowable substra- 
tum, which 'cannot be presented in terms of human 
consciousness,' of which we can know nothing and 
can conceive nothing. Nor do I think they will ever 
find it in the common-sense maxim that 4 this is a 
very comfortable world for the prudent, the lucky, 
and the strong.' 

Frederic Harrison. 



I 



FEEDEEIC HAEEISON. 139 



Postscript. 

I hare found no space to notice Mr. Wilfrid Ward and some of 
my other critics. I do not find that Mr. Ward lias added much to 
the controversy except the rather mess-room remark that Mr. Spen- 
cer and myself are hoth mad. I am the less called on to examine 
his views, inasmuch as his own religious standpoint, I believe, is 
Catholicism in its most Ultramontane form — the Syllabus and the 
Papacy. But in whatever form he may care to present it, Cathol- 
icism is not, in my opinion, within the field of serious religious 
philosophy. And, if the thinking world is not yet ready to accept 
mine, it has so long ago decided to reject his, that the question 
need hardly be revived in the Nineteenth Century. 

To all that he and others have said, as to the same difficulties 
and weaknesses confronting the idea of Humanity as meet that of 
the Unknowable, I could have little trouble in showing, that as we 
claim for Humanity nothing absolute, nothing unreal, and nothing 
ecstatic, no such difficulties arise. It is a strength and a comfort 
to all, whether weak, suffering, or bereaved, to feel that the whole 
sum of human effort in the past, as in the present, is steadily work- 
ing, on the whole, to lessen the sum of misery, to help the father- 
less and the widow, to assuage sickness, and to comfort the lonely. 
This is a real and solid encouragement, proved by all the facts of 
progressive civilization. If it is not the comfort offered by promises 
of ecstatic bliss, and supernatural intervention, it has the merit of 
being true and humane ; not egoist and untrue. If it is not enough, 
it is at least all that men and women on earth have. Resignation 
and peace will be theirs when we have taught them habitually to 
know that it is all — when the promises of the churches are known 
to be false, and the hopes of the superstitious are felt to be dreams. 
— F. H. 



LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM AND 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 

Those who expected from Mr. Harrison an inter- 
esting rejoinder to my reply, will not be disappointed. 
Those who looked for points skilfully made, which 
either are, or seem to be, telling, will be fully satis- 
fied. Those who sought pleasure from witnessing 
the display of literary power, will close his article 
gratified with the hour they have spent over it. 
Those only will be not altogether contented who 
supposed that my outspoken criticism of Mr. Harri- 
son's statements and views, would excite him to an 
unusual display of that trenchant style for which he 
is famous ; since he has for the most part continued 
the discussion with calmness. After saying this 
much it may seem that some apology is needed for 
continuing a controversy of which many, if not most, 
readers, have by this time become weary. But gladly 
as I would leave the matter where it stands, alike to 
save my own time and others' attention, there are 
sundry motives which forbid me. Partly my excuse 
must be the profound importance and perennial inter- 
est of the question raised. Partly I am prompted by 
the consideration that it is a pity to cease just when 

140 



HERBERT SPENCER. 141 

a few more pages will make a clear sundry of the 
issues, and leave readers in a better position for de- 
ciding. Partly it seems to me wrong to leave grave 
misunderstandings unrectified. And partly I am 
reluctant on personal grounds to pass by some of Mr. 
Harrison's statements unnoticed. 

One of these statements, indeed, it would be im- 
perative on me to notice, since it reflects on me in a 
serious way. Speaking of the Descriptive Sociology, 
which contains a large part (though by no means all) 
of the evidence used in the Principles of Sociology, 
and referring to the compilers who, under my super- 
intendence, selected the materials forming that work, 
Mr. Harrison says : — 

Of course these intelligent gentlemen had little difficulty in 
clipping from hundreds of books about foreign races sentences 
which seem to support Mr. Spencer's doctrines. The whole pro- 
ceeding is too much like that of a famous lawyer who wrote 
a law-book, and then gave it to his pupils to find the ' cases ' 
which supported his law. 

Had Mr. Harrison observed the dates, he would 
have seen that since the compilation of the Descriptive 
Sociology was commenced in 186T and the writing of 
Principles of Sociology in 1874, the parallel he draws 
is not altogether applicable : the fact being that the 
Descriptive Sociology was commenced seven years in 
advance for the purpose (as stated in the preface) of 
obtaining adequate materials for generalizations : 
sundry of which, I may remark in passing, have been 
quite at variance with my pre-conceptions. 1 I think 

1 Elsewhere Mr. Harrison contemptuously refers to the Descrip- 
tive Sociology as ' a pile of clippings made to order.' While I have 



142 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

that, on consideration, Mr. Harrison will regret having 
made so grave an insinuation without very good war- 
rant ; and he has no warrant. Charity would almost 
lead one to suppose that he was Dot fully conscious of 
its implications when he wrote the above passage ; for 
he practically cancels them immediately afterwards. 
He says : — 4 But of course one can find in this med- 
ley of tables almost any view. And I find facts 
which make for my view as often as any other.' How 
this last statement consists with the insinuation that 
what Mr. Harrison calls a ' medley ' of tables con- 
tains evidence vitiated by special selection of facts, 
it is difficult to understand. If the purpose was to 
justify a foregone conclusion, how does it happen that 
there are (according to Mr. Harrison) as many facts 
which make against it as there are facts which make 
for it ? 

The question here incidentally raised concerns the 
primitive religious idea. Which is the original belief, 
fetichism or the ghost-theory? The answer should 
profoundly interest all who care to understand the 
course of human thought ; and I shall therefore not 
apologize for pursuing the question a little further. 

Having had them counted, I find that in those four 
parts of the Descriptive Sociology which give accounts 
of the uncivilized races, there are 697 extracts which 

been writing, the original directions to compilers have been found 
by my present secretary, Mr. James Bridge ; and he has drawn my 
attention to one of the ' orders.' It says that all works are ' to be 
read not with a view to any particular class of facts but with«a view 
to all classes of facts.' 



HERBEPwT SPENCER. . 143 

refer to the ghost-theory: illustrating the belief in 
a wandering double which goes away during sleep, or 
fainting, or other form of insensibility, and deserts 
the body for a longer period at death, — a double 
which can enter into and possess other persons, caus- 
ing disease, epilepsy, insanity, etc., which gives rise 
to ideas of spirits, demons, etc., and which origi- 
nates propitiation and worship of ghosts. On the 
other hand there are 87 extracts which refer to the 
worship of inanimate objects or belief in their super- 
natural powers. Now even did these 87 extracts 
support Mr. Harrison's view, this ratio of 8 to 1 would 
hardly justify Iris statement that the facts ' make for 
nrv [his] view as often as any other.' But these 87 
extracts do not make for his view. To get proof that 
the inanimate objects are worshipped for themselves 
simply, instances must be found in which such ob- 
jects are worshipped among peoples who have no 
ghost-theory ; for wherever the ghost-theory exists it 
comes into play and originates those supernatural 
powers which certain objects are supposed to have. 
"When by unrelated tribes, scattered all over the 
world, we find it held that the souls of the dead are 
supposed to haunt the neighboring forests — when we 
learn that the Karen thinks ; the spirits of the de- 
parted dead crowd around him;' 1 that the Society 
Islanders imagined spirits c surrounded them night 
and day, watching every action ; ' 2 that the Nicobar 
people annually compel all the bad spirits to leave 

1 Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, xxiv. part ii. p. 196. 

2 Ellis, Polynesian Researches, vol. i. p. 525. 



144 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

the dwelling ; 1 that an Arab never throws any- 
thing away without asking forgiveness of the E frits 
he may strike ; 2 and that the Jews thought it was be- 
cause of the multitudes of spirits in synagogues that 
4 the dress of the Rabbins became so soon old and torn, 
through their rubbing ; ' 3 — when we find the accom- 
panying belief to be that ghosts or spirits are capable 
of going into, and emerging from, solid bodies in 
general, as well as the bodies of the quick and the 
dead ; it becomes obvious that the presence of one of 
these spirits swarming around, and capable of injur- 
ing or benefiting living persons, becomes a sufficient 
reason for propitiating an object it is assumed to 
have entered: the most trivial peculiarity sufficing 
to suggest possession — such possession being, indeed, 
in some cases conceived as universal, as by the 
Eskimo, who think every object is ruled by ' its 
or his inuk, which word signifies " man" and also 
owner or inhabitant? 4 Such being the case, there 
can be no proof that the worship of the objects them- 
selves was primordial, unless it is found to exist 
where the ghost-theory has not arisen ; and I know 
no instance showing that it does so. But while 
those facts given in the Descriptive Sociology which 
imply worship of inanimate objects, or ascription of 
supernatural powers to them, fail to support Mr. 
Harrison's view, because always accompanied by the 

1 Journ. As. of Ben. xv. pp. 04S-9. 

2 Bastian, Mensch, ii. 109, 113. 

3 Supernatural Religion, 2d ed., vol. i. p. 112. 

4 Dr. Henry Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskiino,*?. 37. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 145 

ghost-theory, sundry of them directly negative his 
view. There is the fact that echo is regarded as the 
voice of the fetich ; there is the fact that the inhabiting 
spirit of the fetich is supposed to ' enjoy the savory 
smell ' of meat roasted before it ; and there is the 
fact that the fetich is supposed to die and may be 
revived. Further, there is the summarized statement 
made by Beecham, an observer of feticliism in the 
region where it is supposed to be specially exemplified, 
who says that : — 

The fetiches are believed to be spiritual, intelligent beings, who 
make the remarkable objects of nature their residence, or enter 
occasionally into the images and other artificial representations, 
which have deen duly consecrated by certain ceremonies. . . . 
They believe that these fetiches are of both sexes, and that they 
require food. 

These statements are perfectly in harmony with the 
conclusion that fetichism is a development of the 
ghost-theory, and altogether incongruous with the 
interpretation of fetichism which Mr. Harrison ac- 
cepts from Comte. 

Already I have named the fact that Dr. Tylor, 
who has probably read more books about uncivilized 
peoples than any Englishman living or dead, has con- 
cluded that fetichism is a form of spirit-worship, and 
that (to give quotations relevant to the present 
issue) 

To class an object as a fetich, demands explicit statement that a 
spirit is considered as embodied in it or acting through it or com- 
municating by it. 1 

1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 133. 



146 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

... A further stretch of imagination enables the lower races to 
associate the souls of the dead with mere objects. 1 

. . . The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to 
objects may be human souls. Indeed, one of the most natural 
cases of the fetich-theory is when a soul inhabits or haunts the 
relics of its former body. 2 

Here I may add an opinion to like effect which 
Dr. Tylor quotes from the late Professor Waitz, 
also an erudite anthropologist. He says : — 

According to his [the negro's] view, a spirit dwells or can 
dwell in every sensible object, and often a very great and mighty 
one in an insignificant thing. This spirit he does not consider as 
bound fast and unchangeably to the corporeal thing it dwells in, 
but it has only its usual or principal abode in it. 3 

Space permitting, I might add evidence furnished by 
Sir Alfred Lyall, who, in his valuable papers fur- 
nished in the Fortnightly Revieio years ago on relig- 
ion in India, has given the results of observations 
made there. Writing to me from the North-West 
provinces under date August 1, in reference to the 
controversy between Mr. Harrison and myself, he 
incloses copies of a letter and accompanying memo- 
randum from the Magistrate of Gorakhpur, in veri- 
fication of the doctrine that ghost-worship is the 
'chief source and origin' of religion. Not, indeed, 
that I should hope by additional evidence to con- 
vince Mr. Harrison. When I point to the high 
authority of Dr. Tylor as on the side of the ghost- 
theory, Mr. Harrison says — ' If Dr. Tylor has finally 
adopted it, I am sorry.' And now I suppose that 

1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 139. 

2 Ibid. p. 137. 3 Ibid. p. 144. 



HERBERT SPEXCER. 147 

when I cite these further high authorities on the 
same side, he will simply say again * I am sorry,' and 
continue to believe as before. 

In respect of the fetichism distinguishable as 
nature-worship, Mr. Harrison relies much on the 
Chinese. He says : — ■ 

The case of China is decisive. There we have a religion of vast 
antiquity and extent, perfectly clear and well ascertained. It rests 
entirely upon worship of Heaven, and Earth, and objects of Nature, 
regarded as organized beings, and not as the abode of human spirits. 

Had I sought for a case of ' a religion of vast anti- 
quity and extent, perfectly clear and well ascertained/ 
which illustrates origin from the ghost-theory, I 
should have chosen that of China ; where the State- 
religion continues down to the present day to be an 
elaborate ancestor-worship, where each man's chief 
thought in life is to secure the due making of sacri- 
fices to his ghost after death, and where the failure 
of a first wife to bear a son who shall make these 
sacrifices, is held a legitimate reason for taking a 
second. But Mr. Harrison would, I suppose, say that 
I had selected facts to fit my hypothesis. I therefore 
give him, instead, the testimony of a bystander. 
Count D'Alviella has published a brochure concerning 
these questions on which Mr. Harrison and I dis- 
agree. 1 In it he says, on page 15 : — 

La these de M. Harrison, au contraire, — que l'homme aural t 
commence par 1' adoration d'objets materiels ' franchement regardes 
comme tels,' — nous parait absolument contraire au raisonnement 
et a Tobservation. II cite, a titre d'example, Pantique religion de 

1 Harrison contre Spencer sur la Valeur Religieuse de Vlncon- 
naissable, par le Cte. Goblet D'Alviella. Paris, Ernest Leroux. 



148 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

la Chine, ' entierement basee sur la veneration de la Terre, du Ciel 
et des Ancetres, considered objectivement et non comme la resi- 
dence d'etres inimateriels.' [This sentence is from Mr. Harrison's 
first article, not from his second.] C'est la jouer de malheur, car, 
sans meme insister sur ce que peuvent etre des Ancetres ' conside- 
red objectivement,' il se trouve precisement que la religion de 
l'ancien empire Chinois est le type le plus par fait de l'animisme 
organize, et qu'elle regarde meme les objets materiels, dont elle fait 
ses dieux, comme la manifestation inseparable, l'enveloppe ou 
meme le corps d'esprits invisibles. [Here in a note Count D'Alvi- 
ella refers to authorities, 'notamment Tiele, Manuel de VHistoire 
des Religions, traduit dar M. Maurice Vernes, Li v. II., et dans la 
Revue de VHistoire des Religions, la Religion de Vancien empire 
Chinois par M. Julius Happel (t. TV. no. 6).'] 

"Whether Mr. Harrison's opinion is or is not 
changed by this array of counter opinion, he may at 
any rate be led somewhat to qualify his original 
statement that ' Nothing is more certain than that 
man everywhere started with a simple worship of 
natural objects.' 

I pass now to Mr. Harrison's endeavor to rebut my 
assertion that he had demolished a simulacrum and 
not the reality. 

I pointed out that he had inverted my meaning by 
representing as negative that which I regarded as 
positive. What I have everywhere referred to as the 
All-Being, he named the All-Nothingness. What 
answer does he make when I show that my position 
is exactly the reverse of that alleged ? He says that 
while I am 'dealing with transcendental conceptions, 
intelligible only to certain trained metaphysicians,' 
he is ' dealing with religion as it affects the lives of 
men and women in the world ; ' that i to ordinary 



HERBERT SPENCER. 149 

men and women an unknowable and inconceivable 
Reality is practically an Unreality ; ' and that thus 
all he meant to say was that the ' Everlasting Yes ' 
of the 'evolutionist,' is in effect on the public a 
mere 'Everlasting No' (p. 93). Now compare 
these passages in his last article with the following 
passages in his first article : — ' One would like to 
know how much of the Evolutionist's day is conse- 
crated to seeking the Unknowable in a devout way, 
and what the religious exercises might be. How 
does the man of science approach the All-Nothing- 
ness ? ' (p. 39.) Thus we see that what was at first 
represented as the unfitness of the creed considered 
as offered to the select is now represented as its un- 
fitness considered as offered to the masses. What 
were originally the ; Evolutionist ' and the c man of 
science ' are now changed into ' ordinary men and 
women ' and ' the public ; ' and what was originally 
called the All-Nothingness has become an ' incon- 
ceivable Reality.' The statement which was to be 
justified is not justified, but something else is justified 
in its stead. 

Thus is it, too, with the paragraph in which Mr. 
Harrison seeks to disprove my assertion that he had 
exactfv transposed the doctrines of Dean Mansel and 
myself, respecting our consciousness of that which 
transcends perception. He quotes his original words, 
which were, ' there is a gulf which separates even his 
all-negative deity from Mr. Spencer's impersonal, un- 
conscious, unthinkable Energy.' And he then goes 
on to say, ' I was speaking of Mansel's Theology, not 



150 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

of his Ontology. I said " deity" not the Absolute.' 
Very well ; now let us see what this implies. Han- 
sel, as I was perfectly well aware, supplements his 
ontological nihilism with a theological realism. That 
which in his ontological argument he represents as a 
mere 'negation of conceivability,' he subsequently 
re-asserts on grounds of faith, and clothes with the 
ordinarily-ascribed divine attributes. Which of these 
did I suppose Mr. Harrison meant by 'all-negative 
deity ? ' I was compelled to conclude he meant 
that which in the ontological argument was said to 
be a ' negation of conceivability.' How could I sup- 
pose that by ' all-negative deity ' Mr. Harrison meant 
the deity which Dean Mansel as a matter of ' duty ' 
rehabilitates and worships in his official capacity as 
priest. It was a considerable stretch of courage on 
the part of Mr. Harrison to call the deity of the es- 
tablished church an ' all-negative deity.' Yet in 
seeking to escape from the charge of misrepresenting 
me he inevitably does this by implication. 

In his second article Mr. Harrison does not simply 
ascribe to me ideas which are wholly unlike those 
my words express, but he ascribes to me ideas I have 
intentionally excluded. When justifying my use of 
the word 'proceed,' as the most colorless word I 
could find to indicate the relation between the 
knowable manifestations present to perception and 
the Unknowable Reality which transcends percep- 
tion, I incidentally mentioned, as showing that I 
wished to avoid those theological implications which 
Mr. Harrison said were suggested, that the words 



HERBERT SPENCER. 151 

originally written were ' created and sustained ; ' and 
that though in the sense in which I used them the 
meanings of these words did not exceed my thought, 
I had erased them because 4 the ideas associated with 
these words might mislead.' Yet Mr. Harrison speaks 
of these erased words as though I had finally adopted 
them, and saddles me with the ordinary connota- 
tions. If Mr. Harrison defends himself by quoting 
my words to the effect that the Inscrutable Existence 
manifested through phenomena ' stands towards our 
general conception of things in substantially the same 
relation as does the Creative Power asserted by 
Theology ; ' then I point to all my arguments as 
clearly meaning that when the attributes and the 
mode of operation ordinarily ascribed to ' that which 
lies beyond the sphere of sense ' will bear the same 
relation as before to that which lies within it, in so 
far that it will occupy the same relative position in 
the totality of our consciousness : no assertion being 
made concerning the mode of connection of the one 
with the other. Surely when I had deliberately 
avoided the word ' create ' to express the connection 
between noumenal cause and the phenomenal effect, 
because it might suggest the ordinary idea of a creat- 
ing power separate from the created thing, Mr. Har- 
rison was not justified in basing arguments against 
me on the assumption that I had used it. 

But the course in so many cases pursued by him 
of fathering upon me ideas incongruous with those I 
have expressed, and making me responsible for the 
resulting absurdities, is exhibited in the most extreme 



152 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

degree by the way in which he has built up for me a 
system of beliefs and practices. In his first article 
occur such passages as —'seeking the Unknowable 
in a devout way' (p. 39); can any one 'hope any- 
thing of the Unknowable or find consolation there- 
in ? ' (p. 40) ; and to a grieving mother he repre- 
sents me as replying to assuage her grief, ' Think on 
the Unknowable ' (p. 40). Similarly in his second 
article he writes, 'to tell them that they are to 
worship this Unknowable is equivalent to telling 
them to worship nothing ' (p. 98) ; ' the worship of 
the Unknowable is abhorrent to every instinct of 
genuine religion' (p. 104); 'praying" to the Un- 
knowable at home ' (p. 134) ; and having in these 
and kindred ways fashioned for me the observances 
of a religion which he represents me as ' proposing,' 
he calls it ' one of the most gigantic paradoxes in the 
history of thought' (p. 94). So effectually has Mr. 
Harrison impressed everybody by these expressions 

and assertions, that I read in a newspaper 'Mr. 

Spencer speaks of the " absurdities of the Comtean 
religion," but what about his own peculiar cult? ' 

Now the whole of this is a fabric framed out of 
Mr. Harrison's imaginations. I have nowhere ' pro- 
posed ' any 'object of religion.' I have nowhere 
suggested that any one should worship this 'Un- 
knowable.' No line of mine gives ground for inquir- 
ing how the Unknowable is to be sought 'in a devout 
way,' or for asking Avhat are ' the religious exercises ;' 
nor have I suggested that any one may find ' conso- 
lation therein.' Observe the facts. At the close of 



HERBERT SPEXCER. 153 

my article, 'Religion: a Retrospect and Prospect,' I 
pointed out to ' those who think that Science is dissi- 
pating religious beliefs and sentiments ' ' that what- 
ever of mystery is taken from the old interpretation 
is added to the new : ' increase rather than diminu- 
tion being the result. I said that in perpetually ex- 
tending our knowledge of the Universe, concrete sci- 
ence ' enlarges the sphere for religious sentiment ; ' 
and that progressing knowledge is ' accompanied by 
an increasing capacity for wonder.' And in my sec- 
ond article, in further explanation, I have represented 
my thesis to be ' that whatever components of this 
[the religious] sentiment disappear, there must ever 
survive those which are appropriate to the conscious- 
ness of a Mystery that cannot be fathomed and a 
Power that is omnipresent.' This is the sole thing 
for which I am responsible. I have advocated noth- 
ing ; I have proposed no worship ; I have said noth- 
ing about 'devotion,' or 'prayer,' or 'religious exer- 
cises,' or ' hope,' or ' consolation.' I have simply af- 
firmed the permanence of certain components in the 
conscfousness which ' is concerned with that which 
lies beyond the sphere of sense.' If Mr. Harrison 
says that this surviving sentiment is inadequate for 
what he thinks the purposes of religion, I simply re- 
ply — I have said nothing about its adequacy or in- 
adequacy. The assertion that the emotions of awe 
and wonder form but a fragment of religion, leaves 
me altogether unconcerned : I have said nothing to 
the contrary. If Mr. Harrison sees well to describe 
the emotions of awe and wonder as ' some rags of 



154 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

religious sentiment surviving ' (p. 99), it is not incum- 
bent on me to disprove the fitness of his expression. 
I am responsible for nothing whatever beyond the 
statement that these emotions will survive. If he 
shows this conclusion to be erroneous, then indeed he 
touches me. This, however, he does not attempt. 
Recognizing though he does that this is all I have as- 
serted, and even exclaiming ' is that all ? ' (p. 99) he 
nevertheless continues to father upon me a number 
of ideas, quoted above, which I have neither expressed 
nor implied, and asks readers to observe how gro- 
tesque is the fabric formed of them. 

I enter now on that portion of Mr. Harrison's last 
article to which is specially applicable its title i Ag- 
nostic Metaphysics.' In this he recalls sundry of the 
insuperable difficulties set forth by Dean Mansel, in 
his Bampton Lectures, as arising when we attempt 
to frame any conception of that which, lies beyond 
the realm of sense. Accepting, as I did, Hamilton's 
general arguments which Mansel applied to theologi- 
cal conceptions, I contended in First Principles that 
their arguments are valid only on condition that that 
which transcends the relative is regarded not as nega- 
tive, but as positive ; and that the relative itself be- 
comes unthinkable as such in the absence of a postu- 
lated non-relative. Criticisms on my reasoning allied 
to those made by Mr. Harrison have been made be- 
fore, and have before been answered by me. To an 
able metaphysician, the Rev. James Martineau, I 
made a reply which I may be excused here for 'repro- 
ducing, as I cannot improve upon it : — 



HERBERT SPENCER. 155 

Always implying terms in relation, thought implies that both 
terms shall be more or less defined ; and as fast as one of them 
becomes indefinite, the relation also becomes indefinite, and thought 
becomes indistinct. Take the case of magnitudes. I think of an 
inch ; I think of a foot ; and having tolerably-definite ideas of 
the two, I have a tolerably-definite idea of the relation between 
them. I substitute for the foot a mile ; and being able to repre- 
sent a mile much less definitely, I cannot so definitely think of the 
relation between an inch and a mile — cannot distinguish it in 
thought from the relation between an inch and two miles as clearly 
as I can distinguish in thought the relation between an inch and 
one foot from the relation between an inch and two feet. And 
now if I endeavor to think of the relation between an inch and the 
240,000 miles from here to the Moon, or the relation between an 
inch and the 92,000,000 miles from here to the Sun, I find that 
while these distances, practically inconceivable, have become little 
more than numbers to which I frame no answering ideas, so, too, 
has the relation between an inch and either of them become prac- 
tically inconceivable. Now this partial failure in the process of 
forming thought-relations, which happens even with finite magni- 
tudes when one of them is immense, passes into complete failure 
when one of them cannot be brought within any limits. The re- 
lation itself becomes unrepresentable at the same time that one of 
its terms becomes unrepresentable. Nevertheless, in this case it 
is to be observed that the almost blank form of relation preserves 
a certain qualitative character. It is still distinguishable as be- 
longing to the consciousness of extensions, not to the conscious- 
ness of forces or durations ; and in so far remains a vaguely- iden- 
tifiable relation. But now suppose we ask what happens when one 
term of the relation has not simply magnitude having no known 
limits, and duration of which neither beginning nor end is cogniza- 
ble, but is also an existence not to be defined ? In other words, 
what must happen if one term of the relation is not only quantita- 
tively but also qualitatively unrepresentable ? Clearly in this case 
the relation does not simply cease to be thinkable except as a rela- 
tion of a certain class, but it lapses completely. When one of the 
terms becomes wholly unknowable, the law of thought can no longer 
be conformed to ; both because one term cannot be present, and be- 
cause relation itself cannot be framed. ... In brief, then, to Mr. 
Martineau's objection I reply, that the insoluble difficulties he 



156 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

indicates arise here, as elsewhere, when thought is applied to that 
which transcends the sphere of thought ; and that just as when 
we try to pass beyond phenomenal manifestations to the Ultimate 
Reality manifested, we have to symbolize it out of such materials 
as the phenomenal manifestations give us ; so Ave have simultane- 
ously to symbolize the connection betweent his Ultimate Reality 
and its manifestations, as somehow allied to the connections among 
the phenomenal manifestations themselves. The truth Mr. Marti- 
neau's criticism adumbrates, is that the law of thought fails where 
the elements of thought fail ; and this is a conclusion quite con- 
formable to the general view I defend. Still holding the validity 
of my argument against Hamilton and Mansel, that in pursuance 
of their own principle the relative is not at all thinkable as such, 
unless in contradistinction to some existence posited, however 
vaguely, as the other term of a relation, conceived however indefi- 
nitely ; it is consistent on my part to hold that in this effort which 
thought inevitably makes to pass beyond its sphere, not only does 
the product of thought become a dim symbol of a product, but 
the process of thought becomes a dim symbol of a process ; and 
hence any predicament inferable from the law of thought cannot 
be asserted. 1 

Thus, then, criticisms like this of Mr. Martineau, 
often recurring in one shape or other, and now again 
made by Mr. Harrison, do not show the invalidity of 
my argument, but once more show the imbecility of 
human intelligence when brought to bear on the ul- 
timate question. Phenomenon without noumenon 
is unthinkable ; and yet noumenon cannot be thought 
of in the true sense of thinking. We are at once 
obliged to be conscious of a reality behind appear- 
ance, and yet can neither bring this consciousness of 
reality into any shape, nor can bring into any shape 
its connection with appearance. The forms of our 
thought, moulded on experiences of phenomena, as 

1 Essays, vol. iii. pp. 293-6. 



HERBEET SPENCEE. 157 

well as the connotations of our words formed to ex- 
press the relations of phenomena, involve us in con- 
tradictions when we try to think of that which is be- 
yond phenomena; and yet the existence of that 
which is beyond phenomena is a necessary datum alike 
of our thoughts and our words. "VVe have no choice 
but to accept a formless consciousness of the inscru- 
table. 

I cannot treat with fulness the many remaining 
issues. To Mr. Harrison's statement that it was un- 
candid in me to implicate him with the absurdities of 
the Comtean belief and ritual, notwithstanding his 
public utterances, I reply that whereas ten years ago 
I was led to think he gave but a qualified adhesion 
to Comte's religious doctrine, such public utterances 
of his as I have read of late years, fervid in their elo- 
quence, persuaded me that he had become a much 
warmer adherent. On his summary mode of dealing 
with my criticism of the Comtean creed some com- 
ment is called for. He remarks that there are ' good 
reasons for declining to discuss with Mr. Spencer the 
writings of Comte ; ' and names, as the first, 'that 
he knows [I know] nothing whatever about them' 
(p. 114). Now as Mr. Harrison is fully aware that 
thirty years ago I reviewed the English version of 
those parts of the Positive Philosophy which treat 
of Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics ; and as he 
has referred to the pamphlet in which, ten years later, 
I quoted a number of passages from the original to 
signalize my grounds of dissent from Comte's system ; 



158 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

I am somewhat surprised by this statement, and by 
the still more emphatic statement that to me ' the 
writings of Comte are, if not the Absolute Unknowa- 
ble, at any rate the Absolute Unknown' (p. 114). 
Doubtless, these assertions are effective ; but like 
many effective assertions they do not sufficiently rec- 
ognize the facts. The remaining statements in this 
division of Mr. Harrison's argument, I pass over : not 
because answers equally adequate with those I have 
thus far given do not exist, but because I cannot give 
them without entering upon personal questions which 
I prefer to avoid. 

On the closing part of 'Agnostic Metaphysics,' 
containing Mr. Harrison's own version of the Relig- 
ion of Humanity, I have to remark, as I find others 
remarking, that it amounts, if not to an abandonment 
of his original position, still to an entire change of 
front. Anxious, as he has professed himself, to re- 
tain the 'magnificent word Religion' (p. 42), it now 
appears that when ' the Religion of Humanity' is spo- 
ken of, the usual connotations of the word are to be 
in large measure dropped : to give it these connota- 
tions is to ' foist in theological ideas where none are 
suggested by us' (p. 121). While, in his first article, 
one of the objections raised to the ' Neo-Theisms,' as 
well as ' the Unknowable,' was that there is offered 
4 no relation whatever between worshipper and wor- 
shipped' (p. 44) (an objection tacitly implying that 
Mr. Harrison's religion supplies this relation), it now 
appears that Humanity is not to be worshipped in any 
ordinary sense; but that by worship is simply meant 



HERBERT SPENCER. 159 

4 intelligent love and respect for our human brother- 
hood,' and that, ' in plain words, the Religion of Hu- 
manity means recognizing your duty to your fellow 
man on human grounds' (p. 122). Certainly this is 
much less than what I and others supposed to be in- 
cluded in Mr. Harrison's version of the Religion of 
Humanity. If he preaches nothing more than an ec- 
static philanthropy, few will object ; but most will 
say that his name for it conveyed to them a much 
wider meaning. Passing over all this, however, I 
am concerned chiefly to point out another extreme 
misrepresentation made by Mr. Harrison when dis- 
cussing my criticism of Comte's assertion that 'vene- 
ration and gratitude' are due to the Great Being 
Humanity. After showing why I conceive ' venera- 
tion and gratitude' are not due to Humanity, I sup- 
posed an opponent to exclaim (putting the passage 
within quotation marks), ' But surely " veneration 
and gratitude" are due somewhere,' since civilized 
society with all its products ' must be credited to some 
agency or other.' [This apostrophe, imagined as com- 
ing from a disciple of Comte, Mr. Harrison, on p. 129, 
actually represents as made in my own person ! ] 
To this apostrophe I have replied (p. 83) that 'if 
" veneration and gratitude" are due at all, they are 
due to that Ultimate Cause from which Humanity, 
individually and as a whole, in common with all other 
things, has proceeded.' Whereupon Mr. Harrison 
changes my hypothetical statement into an actual 
statement. He drops the ' ?/,' and represents me as 
positively affirming that 'veneration and gratitude' 



160 LAST WORDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

are due somewhere : saying that Mr. Spencer 4 lav^ 
ishes his " veneration and gratitude," called out by the 
sum of human civilization, upon his Unknowable and 
Inconceivable Postulate' (p. 129). I should have 
thought that even the most ordinary reader, much 
more Mr. Harrison, would have seen that the argu- 
ment is entirely an argument ad hominem. I delib- 
erately and carefully guarded myself by the ' if 
against the ascription to me of any opinion, one way 
or the other : being perfectly conscious that much is 
to be said for and against. The optimist will unhesi- 
tatingly affirm that veneration and gratitude are due ; 
while by the pessimist it will be contended that they 
are not due. One who dwells exclusively on what 
Emerson calls ' the saccharine' principle in things, as 
illustrated for example in the adaptation of living 
beings to their conditions — the becoming callous to 
pains that have to be borne, and the acquirement of 
liking for labors that are necessary — may think 
there are good reasons for veneration and gratitude. 
Contrariwise, these sentiments may be thought inap- 
propriate by one who contemplates the fact that 
there are some thirty species of parasites which prey 
upon man, possessing elaborate appliances for main- 
taining their hold on or within his body, and having 
enormous degrees of fertility proportionate to the 
small individual chances their germs have of getting 
into him and torturing him. Either view may be 
supported by masses of evidence ; and knowing this 
I studiously avoided complicating the issue by tak- 
ing either side. As any one may see who refers back, 



HERBERT SPENCER. 161 

my sole purpose was that of showing the absurdity 
of thinking that 'veneration and gratitude' are due 
to the product and not to the producer. Yet Mr. 
Harrison, having changed my proposition, '2/* they are 
due,' etc., into the proposition ' they are due,' etc., 
laughs over the contradictions in my views which he 
deduces, and to which he time after time recurs, com- 
menting on my ' astonishing perversity.' 

In this division of Mr. Harrison's article occur five 
other cases in which, after his manner, propositions 
are made to appear untenable or ludicrous; though 
any one who refers to them as expressed by me will find 
them neither the one nor the other. But to show all 
this would take much trouble to small purpose. In- 
deed, I must here close the discussion, so far as my 
own desistance enables me. It is a wearisome and 
profitless business, this of continually going back on 
the record, now to show that the ideas ascribed to 
me are not the ideas I expressed, and now to show 
that the statements my opponent defends are not 
statements that he originally made. A controversy 
always opens side issues. Each new issue becomes 
the parent of further ones. The original questions 
become obscured in a swarm of collateral questions ; 
and energies, in my case ill-spared, are wasted to little 
purpose. 

Before closing, however, let me again point out 
that nothing has been said which calls for change of 
the views expressed in my first article. 

Setting out with the statement that, ' unlike the 



162 LAST WOBDS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM, ETC. 

ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is 
concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of 
sense,' I went on to show that the rise of this con- 
sciousness begins among primitive men with the 
belief in a double belonging to each individual, which, 
capable of wandering away from him during life, be- 
comes his ghost or spirit after death ; and that from 
this idea of a being eventually distinguished as 
supernatural, there develop, in course of time, the 
ideas of supernatural beings of all orders up to the 
highest. Mr. Harrison has alleged that the primitive 
religion is not belief in and propitiation of the ghost, 
but is worship of ' physical objects treated frankly as 
physical objects' (p. 31). That he has disproved 
the one view and proved the other, no one will, I 
think, assert. Contrariwise, he has given occasion 
for me to cite weighty authorities against him. 

Next it was contended that in the assemblage of 
supernatural beings thus originating in each tribe, 
some, derived from chiefs, were superior to others ; 
and that, as the compounding and re-compounding 
of tribes gave origin to societies having social grades 
and rulers of different orders, there resulted that 
conception of a hierarchy of ghosts or gods which 
polytheism shows us. Further it was argued that 
while, with the growth of civilization and knowledge, 
the minor supernatural agents became merged in the 
major supernatural agent, this single great super- 
natural agent, gradually losing the anthropomorphic 
attributes at first ascribed, has come in our days to 
retain but few of them ; and, eventually losing these, 



HERBERT SPENCER. 163 

will then merge into a consciousness of an Omni- 
present Power to which no attributes can be ascribed. 
This proposition has not been contested. 

In pursuance of the belief that the religious 
consciousness naturally arising, and thus gradually 
transformed, would not disappear wholly, but that, 
'however much changed, it must continue to exist,' it 
was argued that the sentiments which had grown up 
around the conception of a personal God, though 
modified when that conception was modified into the 
conception of a Power which cannot be known or 
conceived, would not be destroyed. It was held that 
there would survive, and might even increase, the 
sentiments of wonder and awe in presence of a Uni- 
verse of which the origin and nature, meaning and 
destiny, can neither be known nor imagined ; or that, 
to quote a statement afterwards employed, there must 
survive those emotions 'which are appropriate to the 
consciousness of a Mystery that cannot be fathomed 
and a Power that is omnipresent.' This proposition 
has not been disproved; nor, indeed, has any attempt 
been made to disprove it. 

Instead of assaults on these propositions to which 
alone I am committed, there have been assaults on 
various propositions gratuitously attached to them ; 
and then the incongruities evolved have been repre- 
sented as incongruities for which I am responsible. 

I end hj pointing out, as I pointed out before, that, 
'while the tilings I have said have not been disproved, 
the things which have been disproved are things I 
have not said.' 

Herbert Spencer. 



MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND AGNOSTI- 
CISM. 

As I do not intend to continue the discussion to 
which Mr. Herbert Spencer in the ' Nineteenth Cen- 
tury ' challenges me to return, it may be becoming 
that I say so in public, and accept his third paper as 
closing the debate. Sat prata biberunt. The pub- 
lic has had enough ; and if we pursue it further they 
will think us like the children whose disputes have 
passed into the stage of 4 did ! ' ' didn't ! ' I am well 
content to leave to Mr. Spencer the last ' didn't.' 

I see he is still multiplying c weighty authorities ' 
to convince me of what I never denied — namely, 
that in a very early stage of mental development 
men come to imagine ' ghosts ' and spirits. What I 
assert is that there is a phase of mind even earlier ; 
when living and inert qualities, animal and human, 
are not clearly distinguished. And all Mr. Spencer's 
new authorities, the nameless ' Magistrate of Go- 
rakhpur,' the Comte Goblet D'Alviella, and the 
rest, leave me still impenitent. The witness of Jews 
and Arabs, men in an advanced stage of Theism, is 
obviously irrelevant ; and the Comte D'Alviella, who 
has already sent me his little work, ' Harrison contre 

164 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 165 

Spencer,' repudiates the ' ghost ' theory, and says 
that, with Reville, he believes that ' religion began 
with the worship of natural objects.' The Comte 
Goblet is a very Balaam, the son of Peor. 

Does any man in his senses really deny that in the 
extreme infancy of the mind there is a point when 
the conception of ' ghosts ' has not emerged ? Does 
a baby believe in ghosts ? Do animals ? All the 
anonymous collectors, from Gorakhpur to Boggiey 
Wollah, will never persuade me of this. As I write 
my tabby kitten is playing with a ball, which she 
evidently takes to be alive. Does the kitten fancy 
there is the ' ghost ' of a mouse inside the ball ? Of 
course not: she thinks the ball itself is a kind of 
mouse, or has mousey ways. There we have Fetich- 
ism preceding Spiritualism. 

I have certainly cast no insinuations whatever on 
the three conscientious gentlemen who carried out 
Mr. Spencer's directions to tabulate c all classes of 
facts.' But it is too much to ask me to believe either 
that they knew nothing of Mr. Spencer's theories, or 
that they did not tabulate such facts as they judged 
would be most useful to him. One would as easily 
believe that, when Mr. Gladstone's secretary is di- 
rected to tabulate electoral facts, he has not the 
least idea whether the Premier is about to use them 
in favor of reform or against it. And then, would 
not the philosopher's three ' ghosts ' (as they said in 
the Belt trial) naturally incline to the 'ghost' origin 
of all things ? 

On one point I certainly did misunderstand Mr. 



166 MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND AGNOSTICISM. 

Spencer, and that in all good faith. When he said, 
4 if veneration and gratitude are due at all,' I con- 
fess that I took him to admit that they are due. He 
now says that is not his meaning. Be it so. But if 
his view of religion is that veneration, and gratitude 
have no part in it, that it has no object, and is ' alto- 
gether unconcerned ' with devotion, hope, worship, 
and consolation, the pertinent question occurs — 
Why all these chapters and articles about religion at 
all ? In Mr. Spencer's philosophy, one would think, 
the chapter on religion is like the famous chapter on 
the snakes in Iceland, or the connection between the 
Old and the New Testament, which, we used to be 
told, was a blank page. 

Mr. Spencer and other critics of mine are now con- 
cerned to find that I am c changing my front ' — am 
not an orthodox Positivist, in fact. My ' orthodoxy ' 
is surely my own concern, not theirs. As I have 
never at any time pretended to regard the writings 
of Comte as canonical, or surrendered my own duty 
to use them intelligently, I do not know what 'ortho- 
doxy ' in the matter can mean. As to ' change of 
front,' it is nonsense. If people now find that I do 
not adopt views that were attributed to me, the 
reason is, not that I have changed my views, but that 
opinions were attributed to me without any good 
ground. One lively person, Mr. W. Ward, I think, 
quoted some words which I used in 1880, and con- 
trasted them with the very different language, he 
said, that I used in September last at Newton Hall. 
It so happens that in September last I did repeat the 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 167 

very same words which I used in 1880, and which 
Mr. Ward now tells me I had recanted. They hap- 
pen to come from a form of address which I have re- 
peated scores of times at Newton Hall ever since it 
was opened. This is conclusive, I think, that my 
language has never varied. But I cannot discuss 
with those who will not take the trouble to inform 
themselves of simple facts, and who tell the world 
that on a particular occasion I repudiated language 
which I did there and then publicly use. 

Mr. Spencer is surprised that I should say he does 
not know Comte's writings. I will give my reasons. 
Comte's writings consist of eight principal works 
dating from 1830 to 1856. Of these, I have reason to 
believe, Mr. Spencer has read through none except 
the first, completed in 1842, and that in an abridged 
translation. In 1864, many years after Comte's 
death, and twelve years after Comte had finally set- 
tled his classification of the sciences, Mr. Spencer 
wrote a work on 'The Classification of the Sciences, 
and Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of 
M. Comte.' Throughout this work Mr. Spencer 
speaks of Comte as making six sciences. Now, in 
all Comte's works, except the first, he makes seven 
sciences. The seven sciences are the A B C of Posi- 
tivism ; in Newton Hall, or any other Positivist 
school, tables of the seven sciences may be seen ; and 
they occur in tens of thousands of Positivist publica- 
tions, English and French. Yet for twenty years 
Mr. Spencer has gone on reprinting his < Reasons for 
Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte,' with- 



168 MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND AGNOSTICISM. 

out an inkling of the fact that for thirty-two years 
Comte's works speak of seven, not six, sciences as 
the foundation of his philosophy. Mr. Spencer re- 
prints the work last October, still with the same 
blunder. It is as if a writer on the British Constitu- 
tion persisted in talking about the four estates of the 
Realm, or as if a man should dissent from the Church 
of England on the ground of her having forty-nine 
Articles of Religion. 

To the reprint of the ' Reasons,' etc., published last 
October, Mr. Spencer has added one appendix, 
wherein he sets forth, in sixteen propositions, the 
cardinal principles of his Synthetic Philosophy, and 
he challenges us to say whether they are drawn from 
Comte. I will satisfy him amply. So far as I know, 
they are none of them drawn from Comte. Nay, as 
I understand it, no rational Positivist would accept 
them at all in the absolute, objective form in which 
they are put. 

The sixteen theses, which Mr. Spencer has nailed 
on the door of the Temple of the Unknowable, claim 
to be an explanation of the Universe. They open, 
like the book of Genesis, with the words : w Through- 
out the Universe in general and in detail, there is, 
etc., etc. . . . ;' and then they assert that Evolu- 
tion, Heterogeneity, Integration, Differentiation, In- 
stability, Segregation, Equilibration, Dissolution, 
Persistence, the Unknowable, and so forth, account 
for the Universe as a whole and all its details, or- 
ganic and inorganic, physical, social, and mental. 
Now Positivism looks on all explanations of the 



FREDERIC HARRISON. 169 

Universe as imphilosophical. Comte attempted to 
methodize our knowledge and our inquiries. If 
Mr. Spencer had done nothing but give us an expla- 
nation of the Universe, I should not be his constant 
reader, or count him in the first rank of living phi- 
losophers. I care little for the sixteen theses, which 
are too absolute and pan-Cosmogonical for me. They 
sound to me like the first verse of the Pentateuch or 
the Fourth Gospel. Milton preferred the < Paradise 
Regained' to the 'Paradise Lost,' and the great 
Frederic valued himself on his sonnets and his 
flute. 

If the Synthetic Philosophy were really reduced to 
Segregation and the fifteen other dogmas, two worlds 
would not combine to honor the name of Herbert 
Spencer. It is held in such high honor because they 
find in his works a really unequalled grasp in the 
co-ordination of ideas, a positive method which rarely 
stumbles, a vast fertility of illustration, and a su- 
preme gift for perceiving the harmonies between 
nature and society. Like the alchemists and realists 
of old, Mr. Spencer has done a great work when he 
was seeking something else. He has not explained 
the Universe, but he has given this age a mass of 
philosophic suggestions, which we, professed follow- 
ers of Auguste Comte, most heartily and respectfully 
welcome, and the analogies of which with Positivism 
we are the first to acknowledge. 

Frederic Harrison. 



THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HERBERT 
SPENCER. 

The significant point is that the Gospel is accord- 
ing to Herbert Spencer. 

It has been the fate of Mr. Spencer to be widely 
adjudged at second hand. Multitudes know him 
chiefly through arguments in rebuttal, generally from 
ecclesiastical sources. Thousands of church-folk 
have seen Mr. Spencer demolished, who never saw 
Mr. Spencer. His books are learned and presumably 
hard to be understood. He is the leading mind of 
Agnosticism, and on that question a great majority 
of us are Agnostics. But we have a firm though 
vague idea that Mr. Spencer would turn our worship 
upside down ; would abolish heaven, annihilate God, 
enthrone an abstraction, and, in short, that he is a 
good man to keep away from. 

His late essays in the ' Nineteenth Century Maga- 
zine,' make such a notion henceforth inexcusable. 
In a few pages, not tedious, not even long, he gives 
an intelligible account of himself. It is not necessary 
to be familiar with his theory. An honorable life 

170 



COMMENTS. 171 

may be passed without knowing his views ; but if 
one assumes to hold, still more to express an opinion 
of them, although he be the most hurried citizen of 
the United States, he has no excuse for not fashion- 
ing it intelligently from these latest words of Mr. 
Spencer himself — brief, terse, simple, the gathered 
wisdom of his life-long search, the ripened and mellow 
growth of his most fruitful years. 

Carefully reading these sober, gentle, and patient 
pages, the wonder grows that theology should ever 
have had any quarrel with their author. Accurately 
scanned, thoughtfully judged, as is demanded by the 
large lines on which his scrutiny moves, they make 
it strange that he is not regarded as the strongest 
earthly prop which revealed religion has yet secured. 
If the church could know in this her day the things 
that make for lasting peace and real progress, she 
would not only welcome but claim Herbert Spencer as 
her most timely and vigorous ally, whether he bears her 
banner, or, as an independent sharp-shooter, disables 
her foes simply by the way. For this is what he has 
done; he has given to theology firm standing-ground 
in science. He has come upon heaven by the moun- 
tain path and the postern gate. From atom and fire- 
mist, through rock and star, to the holy spirit of man 
he has pursued his steadfast and stately way, till he 
stands side by side with prophet and apostle in the 
presence of the living God. And all along the way 
his feet are beautiful upon the mountains, because, 
though the voice that cried to him in the wilderness 
was the voice of science, it none- the less impelled 



172 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

and inspired him to prepare the way of the Lord, to 
make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 

So far as appears in this summary of his philoso- 
phy, which is all that we are now to examine, what 
he affirms of theology is its divine essence: what he 
dismisses from theology is the mere human ana, the 
dust and cobweb of the accumulated centuries, the 
defacements and disfigurements caused by loving as 
well by hating hearts, by keen as well as by dull 
minds. There is no possible reconciliation of science 
and religion, for they have never been at war. All 
that is true in religion and all that is true in science 
are but parts of the great plan of creation, absolutely 
harmonious. It is nescience, not science, that clashes. 
Error alwa} r s rattles. Truth fits firmly into place. 
Knowledge is the great peace-maker. It has been 
Mr. Spencer's mission to dispel error by research, to 
give a scientific support to the convictions of faith, 
to prove beyond question that the ultimate conclu- 
sion of science is the supreme God of religion. 

It is not necessary, as it is not possible, to delay 
along the processes which have been the noble life- 
work of Mr. Spencer. It is his conclusion in which 
we are vitally interested. As the last word of science 
its importance cannot be exaggerated : ' Amid the 
mysteries which become the more mysterious the 
more they are thought about, there will remain to 
the man of science the absolute certainty that he is 
ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 
from which all tilings proceed.' 

Does not every Christian recognize this as the God 



COMMENTS. 173 

whom he worships? Not the whole of God, indeed, 
but wholly God. Mr. Spencer does not say God. 
That is not his method. Perhaps his testimony 
would be less valuable if he did say it. God is a 
term of theology, and he writes as a philosopher. 
The strong point is that science, purely and honestly 
besought without regard to theology, bears witness 
of an Energy, omnipresent, the Creator of all things. 

It is hardly possible to overestimate the magnitude 
of this conclusion. With singleness of purpose, with 
a passion of pursuit, with trained research, some- 
times even with unscientific desires, science has 
hunted for the secret of life. Now she formally re- 
linquishes the search. She avows that she cannot 
penetrate the secret. She can find life nowhere 
except from antecedent life. Behind matter in 
every form is always force. At the end of every 
avenue, bounding every vista, the most untiring 
student finds himself still confronting life : life so 
pervash~e, so powerful, that he is fain to call it by 
the most living name of life — life in its mightiest 
form — strength in action — Energy. 

But far back in the undated night of antiquity this 
same word was spoken which science has uttered to- 
day. The Genesis of the Universe in the Revelation 
of the Bible and the Genesis of the Universe in the 
Revelation of Herbert Spencer are one and the same: 
4 In the beo-innin^ God created the heavens and the 
earth.' The very word used for God is a Spencerian 
rather than a theological word — Elohim, the God of 
Strength, the Strong One, the All-mighty, the Energy. 



174 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

God is an Anglo-Saxon word, of late origin, not the 
Elohim, the Energy, of Genesis. The God of the 
first Revelation is not Goodness, but Energy. If Mr. 
Spencer's Energy is an Agnostic abstraction, so is 
the Elohim of the Hebrews. If the testimony of 
science through Mr. Spencer is to be received, the 
testimony of the Bible cannot be refused, on the 
plea that it is called Revelation or that it is an old 
wives' fable. The old wives have established their 
claim to be heard when the young men tell the same 
story. Behind all the life of man and plant and 
planet, the first welter of worlds, the shifting play of 
atoms, the Scriptures, which are called Sacred, just as 
firmly and positively as the Scriptures which are 
called Scientific, place the Infinite Energy, the All- 
mighty, the Essential Life, Life in Itself. Mr. 
Spencer reached his conclusion by skilled study of 
the Phenomenal Universe with the brain which had 
proceeded to him from the Infinite Energy. Holy 
men of old spake moved by the Holy Ghost, which 
also proceeded forth and came from God. The story 
is the same. The claims are the same. Together 
they must stand or fall. 

It is not necessary that he who wrote the olden 
legend should know its scientific bearings. It is not 
necessary that Mr. Spencer should recognize or admit 
the religious bearings of his conclusions. Facts exist 
independent of our regards. The writer of Genesis 
may well have been ignorant of the multiplied uni- 
verses, the unnumbered star-dust which constituted 
his ' heavens.' Mr. Spencer, with all his Christian 



CCXMMENTS. 175 

forbearance, may be one of the unconscious disciples 
who, in the rapturous surprise of some heavenly 
dawn, will wonderingly ask : ' When saw we thee an 
hungered and fed thee?' but none the less along: the 
darkness he lures to brighter worlds and leads the 
way, and none the less in their smaller world 
the ancients discerned the Eternal Energy whence 
the widest worlds proceed. 

Undoubtedly that phase of Mr. Spencer's philoso- 
phy that seems to show the greatest divergence from 
the common theology, and to create the gravest mis- 
trust in the minds of the church, is his refusal to 
ascribe to this Creative Energy, will, intelligence, 
personality, consciousness. Seeing such a statement, 
it is not strange that the devout, but unlearned and 
mentally untrained Christian should cry out in 
bitterness of soul : ' They have taken away the Lord, 
and we know not where they have laid him.' What 
is strange is that our theological leaders, whose busi- 
ness it is to read intelligently, to think logically, to 
represent accurately, should not only join but raise 
the cry. The great leaders of the Bible never neg- 
lected such an opportunity. They fortified them- 
selves with every principle and every person that 
could be gathered to their support from friend or foe. 
Partly because they were socially weak, partly be- 
cause they were morally strong, they struck hands 
with the truth whether it came from the world with- 
out or the world within. When Paul was in Athens 
his spirit was stirred at seeing the city wholly given 
to idolatry, but while he waited there he carefully 



176 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

studied the situation, and when the learning and 
culture as well as the ignorance and idolatry of the 
city gathered into his audience at the Areopagus, his 
quick eye had already seen the point of vantage, and 
with one swift, deft movement he swept the Agnos- 
tics into his ranks against the idolaters. Passing by 
every Mars and Mercury which had stirred his soul, 
he caught at the one element common to his faith 
and theirs, and, with a courtliness which is not only 
lost in our translation but is debased into an unpar- 
donable and un-Pauline brusquerie, he disarms them 
by agreement and conciliates them by compliment. 
The common rumor had charged him with being a 
setter-forth of strange gods. He assures them, on the 
contrary, that he has come to preach a God whom 
they already worship. From among all their array 
of Deities he selects the one true Substance, the one 
Divine Entity, the Unknown God, vague perhaps, 
but untrammelled by error, and holds him before 
them as the God of the Universe. There is no mis- 
taking his meaning. It is the Agnostic God. The 
very word that fell from Paul's own lips is JyvtioTw 
(Agnosto). Whom therefore ye agnostically 
(ttyvoovvjeg) worship, him declare I unto jou. He 
did not preach the Agnosticism of God, but he set 
forth the character, the attributes, the will of the 
Agnostic God. He made the Unknown known. 
Neither against them nor for them did lie quote 
Moses and the prophets, who had no authority among 
them, but he showed himself and the Agnostics to* be 
in common holding what their own poets sung : We 



COMMENTS. 177 

are all his offspring. In Pauline phrase he uttered 
the Spencerian philosophy as acknowledged Greek 
truth: God made the world and all tilings therein: 
The Lord is not far from every one of us : Every- 
where we are in presence of an Infinite and Eter- 
nal Energy, from which all things proceed; that 
Power of which man and the world are products, and 
which is manifested through man and the world from 
instant to instant : In Him we live and move and 
have our being : Our lives, alike physical and mental, 
in common with all the activities, organic and inor- 
ganic, amid which we live, are but the workings of 
this Power. — It is only by th.e style, not by the doc- 
trine, that we can tell St. Paul from St; Herbert. 
Thus, pressing into his service all the available truth 
of Greek philosoplry and Greek poetry, he was ready 
to throw himself with redoubled force, though with 
undiminished politeness, against the falsehood and 
corruption of idolatry. Forasmuch, then, as we are 
the offspring of God, we ought not to think that 
the godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, 
graven by art and man's device; while, recognizing 
the slow evolution of religion, he admits that the 
time of this ignorance God winked at. 

Those, therefore, with whom Paul is authority, 
must agree that by this courteous and free acceptance 
of the truth of the heathen philosophers, he proves 
all truth to be consecrated and divine. If Paul 
could preach an unknown God as a basis of theology, 
the Pulpit cannot be wrong in doing the same 
thing. 



178 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

Again, in addressing the Romans, he not only 
assents but insists that the mountain path and the 
postern gate are legitimate roads to heaven. That 
which may be known of God is manifest in them — 
Gentile as well as Jew, for God hath showed it unto 
them. How ? Precisely in the Herbert Spencer way : 
The invisible things of Him from the creation of the 
world are clearly seen, being understood by the things 
that are made, even His eternal power and godhead, 
infinite and eternal Energy. 

Peter, impetuous, uncultivated, reared in the 
strongest Jewish prejudices, and believing that his 
nation was chosen of God because of its special 
merits and not because of its special qualities, was 
forced to utter the same truth. It is hardly possible 
that he could have understood. It must have seemed 
to him a confusion of inherent distinctions. But he 
was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision, and 
declared, if a little reluctantly : 4 1 perceive that God 
is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that 
feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted 
with Him.' 

Cornelius was a just man, a gentleman, a Roman 
soldier, an officer in a Roman legion, a man of the 
world — distinguished from idolaters in that he 
feared one God ; but he had found him by way of 
the Roman army and polite society. Yet Peter 
assures us that he had found God and was accepted 
with God. 

James, also a servant of God, teaches a. wider 
doctrine ; utters the principle which underlies all : 



COMMENTS. 179 

'Every good gift and every perfect gift is from 
above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, 
with whom is no variableness neither shadow of 
turning ? ' ' If we ask,' says Mr. Spencer, ' whence 
come the structure and functions of humanity even 
in its highest development, it still owes whatever 
there is in it of beauty to that Infinite and Eternal 
Energy.' 

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from 
above. Mr. Spencer is in accord with James. The 
way of Herbert Spencer to God is not only justified 
but confirmed. Science is not only recognized but 
signalized as a guide to heaven. The inspiration of 
the philosopher is established out of the Book of 
Inspiration. This is the heritage of the servants 
of the Lord, that they shall be all taught of God. 
Then shall we know if we follow on to know the 
Lord. Who is he that shall preach another spirit, 
another Gospel? 

Let no one, then, fear that Mr. Spencer is ruling 
God out of his Universe, for that is exactly what he 
is not doing. On the contrary, his great work is 
finding God ; is showing that Science, step by step, 
just as Revelation by authority, reveals God supreme. 
Nowhere so plainly and grandly as from his pages 
are Science and Revelation seen to be the two 
pillars, symmetrical, immovable, above all things 
harmonious, which upbear the majesty of the Eternal 
Throne. Speaking after the manner of Swedenborg, 
we might rather say they are the two sides of Jacob's 
ladder reaching from earth to heaven, whereon may 



180 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

be seen the angels ascending and descending. They 
compose the great electric circle of the Universe, one 
arc mounting from earth to heaven, the other cours- 
ing from heaven to earth. 

The ancients strained language to the uttermost to 
represent the greatness of God. Mr. Spencer relin- 
quishes language in despair, but he does not relin- 
quish God. He refuses to affirm of this Ensrgy, 
personality, will, intelligence, consciousness ; but it 
is because these are terms of human thought, and 
the Ultimate Energy transcends "human thought. 
He will not belittle God. He will not say that this 
Energy is intelligent; not because it maybe unin- 
telligent, but because it is so far beyond all possible 
meanings of the word intelligent, that intelligence is 
indeed an idle word. And when we think of our 
own minds ; of the difficulty Ave have in bringing 
our little plans to bear; and then turn to the un- 
numbered Universes of worlds, thrilling with vital- 
ity, equally adequate and perfect in the scale of 
the butterfly's wing, which only the microscope can 
discern, and the tint of the rosy star, which only the 
telescope can lure out of the depth of the incon- 
ceivable heavens ; and small and great and near and 
far swinging through space with all the precision of 
mathematics and all the rhythm of music and all the 
freedom of life — why, we cannot think that Mr. 
Spencer is over-cautious. The Power that ordains this 
mighty symphony is so far beyond the fitful gleam 
which we call mind that perhaps the utmost sttetch 
of mind is to call it the Unknowable. Submitting 



COMMENTS. 181 

with humility to the limits of human intelligence, 
Mr. Spencer avers that the choice is not between 
personality and something lower, but between per- 
sonality and something higher ; not that the Energy 
is impersonal, but that it transcends personality. 
Consciousness he declines to affirm, because the very 
limits of consciousness disappear as human thought 
mounts towards its source. 4 The Ultimate Power is 
no more representable in terms of human conscious- 
ness than human consciousness is representable in 
terms of a planet's functions; yet an indestructible 
consciousness of it is the very basis of all intelli- 
gence. To say that because the Infinite Energy 
from which all things proceed cannot in any way be 
brought within the limits of human consciousness, it 
therefore approaches a nonentity, seems to me like 
one who says of a vast number, that because it 
passes all possibility of enumeration, it is like noth- 
ing, which is also innumerable.' 

With constant care, with a painstaking which it 
would seem impossible to elude, Mr. Spencer seeks 
to guard against the tendency which he foresees to 
represent him as banishing God from the Universe. 
Both against the Churchman who fears that he will, 
and the Positivist who fears that he will not, he 
calmlv maintains that so far from regarding that 
which transcends phenomena as the All-Xothingness, 
he regards it as the All-Being. The Unknowable is 
the Ultimate Reality. It is unknowable in the 
sense that it cannot be held within the limits of the 
human intelligence, and not in the sense that it 



182 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

cannot be present to the human consciousness. He 
insists that belief in its existence has, among our 
beliefs, the highest validity of any. His Agnosti- 
cism confesses inability to know the nature of the 
Power manifested through phenomena, but it avows 
the existence of that Power to be of all things most 
certain. 

4 Is it not just possible,' he suggests, c that there is 
a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence 
and Will as these transcend mechanical motion? . . . 
Have we not seen how utterly incompetent our 
minds are to form even an approach to a conception 
of that which underlies all phenomena? Is it not 
proved that this incompetency is the incompetency 
of the conditioned to grasp the unconditioned? 
Does it not follow that the Ultimate Cause cannot 
in any respect be conceived by us because it is in 
every respect greater than can be conceived?' 

Has theology any quarrel with this devout and 
humble student finding in many mazes no certain 
pathway, but holding fast to his fragile and slander 
clew of truth, penetrating the wilderness of the ages, 
which trembles under his tread into teeming life, till 
he stands reverent and silent in the Incomprehensi- 
ble Presence? Certainly the Bible has no quarrel 
with him. 

Out of the unconsuming fire the truth of Herbert 
Spencer was burnt into the older world — the self- 
existence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy — not 
to be held in human definition — I am that J am. 
In that oldest of books, the spirited and splendid 



COMMENTS. 183 

drama of Job, the Unknowable is placed as far be- 
yond human ken as by Mr. Spencer. Touching the 
All-mighty, we cannot find him out. 'Behold! 
God is great, and we know him not, neither can the 
number of his years be searched out. We cannot 
order our speech by reason of darkness.' We cannot 
say of this Energy, personality, consciousness, by 
reason of the outer darkness which lies beyond the 
little lamp of the human mind. So vividly did this 
Energy picture itself on the poet's vision that he 
represents it as speaking out of the whirlwind to 
accentuate the inability of human intelligence to 
grasp the Unknowable. * Where wast thou when I 
laid the foundation of the earth? Where is the way 
where light dwelleth? Canst thou bind the sweet 
influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion ? 
Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts ? or who 
giveth understanding to the heart ? Canst thou find 
out the Almighty unto perfection ? ' So with swift 
touch but iron grasp the furthest heavens and the 
deep spirit of man are gathered to the feet of the 
Infinite Energy which doeth great things and un- 
searchable. 

To the Prophet Isaiah came a voice which he 
thought was the voice of the Infinite and Eternal 
Energy : ' I am the Lord. There is none else. I am 
the first and I am the last. I form the light and 
create darkness. I have made the earth and created 
man upon it. I have stretched out the heavens, and 
all their hosts have I commanded. I am the Lord, 
that maketh all things ; that stretcheth forth the 



184 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

heavens above ; that spreadeth abroad the earth by 
myself.' 

Just as positively, if not as picturesquely, Paul 
maintained the unknowableness of the Infinite En- 
ergy. ' Of him, and through him, and to him, are all 
things ; but how unsearchable are his judgments, and 
his ways past finding out ! Who hath known the 
mind of the Lord?' 

The earliest poet and the greatest prophet, the 
last apostle and the latest philosopher, agree in 
declaring that the Infinite Energy, from which all 
things proceed, cannot be comprehended by human 
faculties ; is the Unknowable. 

Still another step Air. Spencer takes along the 
road of science, and finds the Infinite Energy to be 
not only creative but, inferentially, good. Fully 
recognizing the evil that is in the Universe, he recog- 
nizes as fully that, on the whole, evolution is from 
the lower to the higher. 'If we take the highest 
product of evolution, civilized human society, and 
ask to what agency all its marvels must be credited, 
if we take the highest form which civilized society 
will ever attain, still we must owe it all to that 
Infinite and Eternal Energy, out of which humanity 
has quite recently emerged, and into which it must, 
in course of time, subside.' This is purely scriptural 
in its ascription of all praise to God ; in its assertion 
that humanity with all its power of improvement 
came from God, and, of limited duration, will one 
day revert to its source, i, and I alone, am Alpha 
and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and 



COMMENTS. 185 

the last. TJie heavens shall pass away, the earth 
and the works that are therein shall be burned up. 
AVe differ, if indeed we do differ, from Mr. Spencer, 
only in looking for a new heaven and a new earth 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

Here, however, may be noted almost the sole mis- 
representation in Mr. Spencer's essays of which we 
have to complain. Among religious beliefs which 
must die out, he places belief in a Power which 
'should be seized with a craving for praise; and 
having created mankind, should be angry with them 
if they do not perpetually tell him how great he is.' 
This seems like a little incursion into the brilliant 
rhetorical domains of Mr. Frederic Harrison, and is 
wholly unlike the trustworthy simplicity, veracity, 
and logic of Mr. Spencer. Where does Mr. Spencer 
find such a Power ? Not in the Bible surely. The 
Power of the Bible is distinctly declared not to dwell 
in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped 
with men's hands as though he needed anything, see- 
ing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things. 
The inspiration of the Bible is a divine unselfishness. 
God is angry; but he is always angry with wicked- 
ness, which debases man. He demands worship, but 
it is to exalt the nature of man, not His own. Even 
through the obscuring medium of unspiritual minds, 
he is seen to be a Being who lavishes himself on hu- 
manity for its elevation. Mr. Spencer himself is at 
one with the Creative Power in trying to draw men 
from degrading worship of the created and of sym- 
bols, to a devout contemplation of the Creator. 



186 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

Here also does Mr. Spencer rise to the height of 
his great argument ? c Our lives, alike physical and 
mental, are but the workings of the Ultimate Power.' 
Why not moral? The Ultimate Energy must con- 
tain, in essence and puissance, everything which is 
manifest in the Phenomenal Universe not only of 
matter but of mind, not only of mind but of charac- 
ter, the energy of love as well as the energy of force. 
Character is the highest development of humanity. 
Love is the strongest power of the Phenomenal 
Universe. If not as pervasive as energy, it is as per- 
vasive as life. Highest of energies, belonging only 
to the spirit, all life reddens with its dawn, but only 
the living soul basks in its full radiance, the risen 
sun of the whole Spiritual Universe. If there may 
be a mode of being as much transcending intelligence 
and will as these transcend mechanical motion, why 
should there not be a mode of being equally tran- 
scending love ? Why should not Mr. Spencer say as 
the legitimate outcome of his philosophy, that neither 
death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor 
powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor 
height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be 
able to separate us from the love of the Being who 
transcends love? John, less hampered by verbal or 
philosophical limitations, says simply, ' God is love.' 
He feels the inadequacy of the word, and strengthens 
it to its utmost possibilities. God is not merely 
loving. He is so loving that he is love itself. This 
is the nearest that human language can get to the 
infinite quality which Mr. Spencer may decline to 



COMMENTS. 187 

designate, but which he cannot deny. Love, no less 
than life, springs from that Eternal and Infinite 
Energy which is the source of all things. 

Do I seem to be thrusting Mr. Spencer against his 
will into the Kingdom of Heaven ? I have a right 
to do it. He has no monopoly of the truths which 
he discovers, which he arranges, but which he does 
not create or control. He is himself as much a 
part of the divine Order of the Universe as is the 
law of gravitation, and in the evolution of religion 
he must go where he belongs, and does not inevitably 
belong where he wishes to go. He cannot deny him- 
self to teleology any more than he can deny a stone 
or a star. 

It is only fair to say that he shows no reluctance 
to take his appropriate place. He indicates, indeed, 
not only willingness but intention to occupy common 
ground with theology, and distinctly points out the 
place where he is to be found. * My argument was 
that in the discovery by Science that it could not do 
more than ascertain the order among phenomena, 
there was involved a tacit confession of impotence 
in presence of the Mystery of Things — a confession 
which brought Science into sympathy with Religion; 
and that in their joint recognition of an Unknowable 
Cause for all the effects constituting the knowable 
world, Religion and Science would reach a truth 
common to the two. ... I held at the outset, and 
continue to hold, that this inscrutable existence 
which Science, in the last resort, is compelled to 
recognize as unreached by its deepest analysis of 



188 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCEB. 

matter, motion, thought, and feeling, stands towards 
our general conception of things in substantially the 
same relation as does the Creative Power asserted by 
Theology, and that when Theology, which has al- 
ready dropped many of the anthropomorphic traits 
ascribed, eventually drops the last of them, the foun- 
dation-beliefs of the two must become identical. 
. . . This reality transcending appearance, standing 
towards the Universe and towards ourselves in the 
same relation as an anthropomorphic Creator was 
supposed to stand, bears a like relation with it not 
only to human thought but to human feeling ; the 
gradual replacement of a Power allied to humanity 
in certain traits, by a Power which we cannot say is 
thus allied, leaves unchanged certain of the senti- 
ments comprehended under the name of religion. 
There must ever survive those which are appropriate 
to the consciousness of a Mystery which can never 
be fathomed and a Power that is omnipresent. To 
suppose that this relatively-evanescent form of ex- 
istence ought to occupy our minds so exclusively 
as to leave no space for a consciousness of that 
Ultimate Existence of which it is but one form out 
of multitudes — an Ultimate Existence which was 
manifested in infinitely-varied ways before humanity 
arose, and will be manifested in infinitely-varied 
ways when humanity has ceased to be, seems very 
strange — to me, indeed, amazing.' 

This is not the language of Sam Jones, or of 
Evangelist Hammond ; I would to God it were! 

But if the Infinite Energy be so far beyond human 



COMMENTS. 189 

ability that human words fail when applied to it, 
how can that Energy be the God that made man in 
his own image ? 

Even to this, Philosophy framed the answer be- 
fore the question was formulated. With trained 
sensitiveness of touch to truth, following his slender 
clew from the first groping of primitive man, Mr. 
Spencer discovers the final outcome of that rude 
original speculation to be that the Power manifested 
throughout the Universe distinguished as material is 
the same power which in ourselves wells up under 
the form of consciousness. Or, to present it in the 
opposite order, ' the power which manifests itself in 
consciousness is but a differently-conditioned form of 
the power which manifests itself beyond conscious- 
ness.' But the Energy within consciousness is 
humanity and the Energy that transcends conscious- 
ness is God, and this Energy, says Mr. Spencer, is the 
same. In the image of God made he him. Beloved, 
now are we indeed the sons of God, for Herbert 
Spencer affirms it. 

The one is the language of social intercourse, of 
living literature, of vivid poetry ; the other is the 
technology of metaphysics, but clear shining through 
both is the radiant truth that man — alone of all cre- 
ated things — is like unto God. Therein is life. 
6 Because I live ye shall live also.' 

' The wish that of the living -whole 
No life may fail -beyond the grave. 
Derives it not from what we have 
The likest God within the soul ? ' 



190 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

Where Mr. Spencer says that the Infinite Energy 
is the unknown cause of which the entire Cosmos is 
a manifestation, the Psalmist says, the Heavens de- 
clare the glory of God. From David we call it 
revelation, and after Mr. Spencer we call it manifes- 
tation ; but manifestation is the Revelation of Sci- 
ence and revelation is the Manifestation of Religion. 
Behind both, the Lord our God is one Lord. 

An Evolution of the Universe, especially an Evo- 
lution of Religion, seems to some the abnegation of 
religion. Nothing is more ungrounded. The way in 
which God communicates with men, the way in which 
the Infinite Energy permeates humanity with a con- 
sciousness of itself, the way in which noumenon 
causes phenomena is the Divine and true way, 
whether men have discovered it or have imagined 
some other way. The Lord is righteous in all his 
ways. Salvation is of the Jews; but in all the ages 
and all the peoples, among which the history of the 
Jewish nation is but a tarn on the highlands of an 
ancient continent, with one little rill leading to our 
later levels — did God leave himself without witness ? 
Granting, what we do not now discuss, that there was 
a special Hebrew Revelation, does that preclude all 
other manifestations of the Infinite to the finite? 
Does the absolute Reality stand in no relation to 
human beings unless they have Abraham to their 
father? Verily I say unto you that God is able out 
of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 
That is precisely what he has done. Out of the 
stones and the stars and the fishes and the beasts, by 



COMMENTS. 191 

geology and biology and astronomy, God has raised 
up men to testify of him by the way of science, just 
as truly as he reared the Jewish nation to testify of 
him by way of another Revelation. He lives through 
all life, extends through all extent, spreads undi- 
vided, operates unspent. If among the ancient peo- 
ples the spirit of man was led by slow steps, through 
the workings of his own mind, through the conscious- 
ness of his own soul up to the consciousness of a 
great soul brooding over the universe, an Infinite 
Energy creating and sustaining all things, shall not 
the Judge of all the earth do right? Because life 
and immortality were brought to light through the 
Gospel, shall man be forbidden to mount 

'the great world's altar-stairs, 
That slope thro' darkness up to God ? ' 

It is as irreligious in theology to profane science and 
to deny God in history as it can be in science to pro- 
fane theology and to deny God in Christ. The Lord 
our God is one Lord. If He hid some truths from 
the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes 
centuries before the wise and prudent found them 
out, it is not that the babes may scorn the wise and 
prudent. Still less is it that the babes ma}' plume 
themselves on their babyhood and think wisdom and 
prudence of small account. It is just as likely to be 
because the ignorant, silly babes could never have 
found it out of themselves, for all their need, while 
the firm feet could trace the long hard road that 
leads through darkness up to God. And when the 



192 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPENCER. 

strong man comes panting, torn, worn, but smiling 
still, out of the wilderness of rock and quagmire and 
precipice and torrent and tangle through which he 
has spent his life in finding the right way, and comes 
suddenly upon the children of light playing in the 
courtyard of heaven, is it for them to jeer at him and 
belittle his work, saying scornfully, 'We have always 
been here ' ? Still less is it for them to frown and 
rebuke him for wickedness in threading and studying 
the wilderness, which is as truly a part of the king- 
dom of heaven as the pleasant garden which He 
gave to His Beloved, sleeping. Wisdom and dis- 
cernment, the power to see and to reason are among 
God's best gifts. Such extraordinary, generous seek- 
ing as has been Mr. Spencer's life-work is high. Few 
can attain unto it. If the Infinite Energy, creating 
few Spencers but many babes, filled their out- 
stretched, lame hands of faith and hope with full 
assurance, let them joy in God, and rejoice in the 
God of their salvation; but let them nevertheless 
put off their shoes from off their feet when they turn 
to Herbert Spencer, for the place whereon he stands 
is also holy ground. 



THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO FREDERIC 
HARRISON. 

So far as quality indicates order of Evolution, Mr. 
Harrison must be placed some aeons preceding Mr. 
Spencer. He is characterized as the ablest English 
representative of Comte's Positive Philosophy. If 
this is true, Positive Philosophy is in a bad way. 
Certainly, in his replies to Mr. Spencer, its ablest 
English representative shows an astonishing indepen- 
dence of the scientific method. He is a reckless lo- 
gician and not a very clever sophist. He does not 
hesitate to employ, and he makes no effort to con- 
ceal, such broad and palpable fallacies as are usu- 
ally considered appropriate only to the vulgar. His 
argument is disfigured with that most ready and 
rude of all devices, misrepresentation of his oppo- 
nent. His sense of propriety is ever at the mercy of 
a tyrannous self-love. He attacks Mr. Spencer 
with a blithe unconsciousness of any inequality, and 
complains of the two or three mitigated blows which 
Mr. Spencer is stirred to give him, as if they were a 
real grievance. It is the half-earnest, half-playful 
encounter of a big, sedate Scotch collie with a pam- 
pered, saucy, lively little poodle. The lively little 

193 



194 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

poodle skips to and fro with the greatest agility — 
the agility of his motions being far more manifest 
than their sagacity. He barks sharply and indus- 
triously, and worries the big collie somewhat, but only 
worries him ; never makes him deflect by one hair's 
breadth from his steadfast purpose ; and when, after 
much teasing, the collie turns upon the poodle with 
only a suggestive shake, the surprised aggressor 
droops visibly, though the good-natured collie is too 
proud to keep hold, but summarily leaves his auda- 
cious antagonist with an impatient growl at his own 
folly in condescending for a moment to the unequal 
fight. 

Nothing more clearly marks the unscholarly habit 
of Mr. Harrison than the sentence of whose bearings 
he is so unaware that he places it conspicuously, at the 
very opening of an essay : 4 Ten years ago I warned 
Mr. Herbert Spencer that his Religion of the Unknow- 
able was certain to lead him into strange company.' 
The self-betraying attitude needs no characterization 
to be amusing, but can he claim to be a scientist 
who sees any possible relation between the search for 
truth and the consequences of truth? We are not un- 
familiar with this form of argument in the pulpit, and 
there we call it narrow, unscientific, bigoted. But it 
is no more unscientific in the pastor of the First 
Orthodox Church in Agawam than it is in the brilliant 
and able Positivist of Newton Hall. If it is priest- 
ridden to forbid an Andover student to prosecute 
research in a certain direction because it may land 
him in Unitarianism, what is it to 4 warn ' Herbert 



COMMENTS. 195 

Spencer against his line of study lest it lead him into 
Evangelical ranks ? Between the fear of the ortho- 
dox that Mr. Spencer is ruling the Creator out of his 
Universe, and the fear of the Positivists that he is 
ruling him in, the unlucky philosopher must find 
that pure science is sore beset. 

For this is really Mr. Harrison's quarrel with Mr. 
Spencer. He professes that it is exactly the opposite, 
but he proves that it is this. He is not intellectually 
honest either with himself or with his readers. He is 
not in search of truth ; he is advocating a theory. He 
hath said in his heart, there is no God; and now he says 
in his head, there shall be no God. Reading Mr. Spen- 
cer with his elbows, as his manner is, he has evidently 
counted on him for a teacher of the Harrisonian 
righteousness ; but advancing along the lines of his 
majestic thought, more and more clearly we discern 
the Absolute Being of pure science, the Almighty 
God of true theology. Frederic Harrison also sees 
and trembles. He assumes to be arguing against the 
All-Nothingness and consequent insufficiency of Mr. 
Spencer's Absolute Being; but really the fear of God 
is ever before his eyes. It is against the godhood 
of the Absolute Being that most of his argument is 
directed. It is not insufficiency but all-sufficiency 
that troubles him. In his opening paragraph he 
makes an almost hysterical attempt to widen the 
breach which he sees desperately closing between 
Spencer and Theology. He throws the careless reader 
off the scent by asserting that there is nothing to 
Mr. Spencer's God but negation, and then opens fight 



196 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

upon him strenuously as the God of Theology ! Of 
Mr Spencer's essay he says : 'It is the last word of the 
Agnostic Philosophy in its long controversy with 
Theology. That word is decisive, and it is hard to see 
how Theology can rally for another bout ; ' and hav- 
ing thus attempted to set a flagging Theology upon 
Mr. Spencer, he coolly turns upon Mr. Spencer and 
girds at him up hill and down dale, for being too the- 
ological ! In one place he says, 'I insist that, to 
ordinary men and women, an unknowable and incon- 
ceivable Reality is practically an Unreality.' In 
another place he says, 'Practically, so far as it affects 
the lives of men and women in the battle of life, the 
Absolute and Unconditional Godhead of learned di- 
vines is very much the same thing as the Absolute 
Unknowable.' From which it follows that the God 
which learned divines have been preaching to ordi- 
nary men and women is a practical Unreality ! 

' I do not remember,' he says, ' that Mr. Spencer 
has ever formulated the Unknowable in terms with 
so deep a theological ring as we hear in the phrase 
" Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things 
proceed." ' Certainly, then, Mr. Spencer and the 
theologians should embrace, not fight. 

'Mr. Spencer has discovered his Unknowable 
to be Ultimate Cause, the All-Being, the Creative 
Power, and all the other "alternative impossibilities 
of thought " which he once cast into the teeth of the 
older theologies. Naturally there is joy over one phi- 
losopher that repenteth.' But how can Theology be 
engaged at one and the same moment in recovering 



COMMENTS. 197 

from the knock-down which Mr. Spencer has given 
her and in rejoicing over him as a penitent ? And if 
Mr. Spencer has come over to the older theologies, 
what have the older theologies to rally from ? 

Mr. Harrison boasts that still Mr. Spencer's Energy 
is not He, but It. Yet he objects to the Synopsis be- 
cause the theses 'open like the book of Genesis. 
They sound to me like the first verse of the Penta- 
teuch or the Fourth Gospel,' but the first verse of 
the Pentateuch and of the Fourth Gospel is, In the 
Beginning — God ! Then the last word of the Agnos- 
tic Philosophy in its long contest with Theology is 
the same as the first word of Theology, and that word 
is not It, but He ! In the long controversy Theology 
is victorious. In occasionally maintaining this asser- 
tion, Mr. Harrison is quite right, though not quite 
consistent. In fact, while Mr. Harrison is intermit- 
tently right, he never can be consistent. 

On another page he affirms that 4 Mr. Spencer's 
Energy remains always Energy, Force, nothing an- 
thropomorphic ; such as electricity ; is certainly not 
God, has no analogy with God.' A few pages later, 
quoting and indorsing the religious newspapers, he 
maintains that this assertion of Energy is ' equivalent 
to the assertion that God is the mind and spirit of 
the Universe.' So it seems that Mr. Spencer's Energy 
is electricity when Theology is to be routed by Mr. 
Spencer, but God when Mr. Spencer is to be swal- 
lowed up of Theology. 

Mr. Harrison belongs to the class that specially 
needs good memory. His own words prove that 



198 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HAKRISON. 

when he was trying to rouse the odium theologicum 
against Mr. Spencer, he knew he was doing it on a 
false pretence. Tongues of men and angels will 
never secure any large following to the Great Being 
Humanity if the little beings of humanity disport 
themselves in this ungodly fashion. It is worse than 
the 'slip-slop of theologians' which, as Mr. Har- 
rison naively remarks, ' Mr. Spencer, as much as any 
man living, has finally torn to shreds.' Just as much ; 
for it would be difficult to find any man living who 
had ever seen any kind of slop torn to shreds ! 

Against Mr. Spencer's compact and unimpassioned 
logic Mr. Harrison's rickety rhetoric falls and fails 
so utterly as to deprive him of authority with every 
person who knows how to read. It has been said 
that Mr. Harrison's ' especial studies give authority 
to his utterances,' but no studies can give authority 
to one who contradicts himself and misrepresents 
his opponent at every turn. It is not what a man 
studies, but what he gets from his studies, that gives 
him authority. It is only in his representative capac- 
ity as the 'ablest English Positivist' that the con- 
clusions of so inconsequent and untrustworthy a 
writer can repay scrutiny. A single paragraph — a 
fraction of a paragraph — presents a model to be 
scrupulously avoided by every conscientious student. 

Mr. Spencer had given his solemn conclusion: 
'Amid the mysteries which become the more myster- 
ious the more they are thought about, there will 
remain the one absolute certainty, that he [man] is 
ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 
from which all things proceed.' 



COMMENTS. 199 

To which thus responds Mr. Harrison : — 

4 Fully accepting Mr. Spencer's logical canons, one 
does not see why it should be called an " absolute 
certainty." " Practical belief " satisfies me.' What 
then ? Is Mr. Spencer writing to satisfy Mr. Harri- 
son? Conceding Mr. Spencer's logical canons, it is 
an absolute certainty, which seems a tolerably good 
reason why it should be called so. 

4 "Infinite" and "Eternal," also, can mean to Mr. 
Spencer nothing more than "to which we know no 
limits, no beginning or end," and, for my part, I pre- 
fer to say this.' No one hinders, but Mr. Spencer 
says it better. Mr. Spencer is terse. Mr. Harrison 
is diffuse and tautological. ' Again, " an Energy" — 
why AN Energy. The Unknowable may certainly con- 
sist of more than one energy. To assert the presence 
of one uniform Energy is to profess to know some- 
thing very important about the Unknowable.' But 
to assert that Energy is one is not more a pro- 
fession of knowledge than to assert that it m&y be 
more than one. To assert that it is homogeneous is 
no more an assumption of knowledge than to assert 
that it may be heterogeneous. 

'And then "from which all things proceed" is 
perhaps a rather equivocal reversion to the theologic 
type. . . . Let us keep the old words, for we all mean 
much the same thing ; and I prefer to put it thus. 
All observation and meditation, science and philos- 
ophy, bring us " to the practical belief that man is 
ever in the presence of some energy or energies of 
which he knows nothing, and to which therefore he 



200 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARBISON. 

would be wise to assign no limits, conditions or func- 
tions." ' But Mr. Harrison's 'preference' involves 
him in self-contradiction. An ' energy of which he 
knows nothing ' is an absurdity. To know that it is 
an energy is to know something, and to know some- 
thing very important about it. Energy is power ; 
power either in action or capable of action. More- 
over, Mr. Harrison has already admitted that as a 
summary of philosophical conclusions, Mr. Spencer's 
statement seems to him ' frankly unanswerable.' In 
so doing he admits with Mr. Spencer that this Energy 
is everywhere present and is the source of all things, 
and this is to know more of it than of anything else 
in the heavens above or the earth beneath or the 
waters under the earth. 

' This is doubtless what Mr. Spencer himself 
means.' As it is not in the least what Mr. Spencer 
says ; as it is in fact the direct opposite of what he 
says, the direct denial of his most weighty assertion, 
this must be considered as an extraordinarily jaunty 
non-sequitur. But even then Mr. Harrison is not 
satisfied. Having stripped Mr. Spencer's conclusion 
of all its conclusiveness ; having pecked and pulled 
and snipped and stitched until this insignificant re- 
mark, mingled of the camp-meeting exhortation, the 
lawyer's brief and the journeyman's blunder, is all 
that is left us of Mr. Spencer's stately and solemn 
utterance, he instantly and disdainfully tosses it 
aside. 

6 For my part, I prefer his old term, the Unknowa- 
ble.' Frankly, then, why not say so at the beginning, 



COMMENTS. 201 

and spare us all this patchwork ? Ah ! because even 
on this he plants himself only while one should hold 
his breath, touching it only to spurn it like a toy 
balloon. 

4 Though I have always thought that it would be 
more philosophical not to assert of the unknown that 
it is the unknowable.' It certainly would. It is 
not philosophical at all to assert of the unknown 
that it is unknowable ; moreover, it is not true. Mr. 
Spencer never does it. Unknowable has reference to 
human faculties, not simply to cosmic or other facts. 
But here soars the balloon again : — 

4 And, indeed, I would rather not use the capital 
letter, but stick literally to our evidence, and say 
frankly the unknown.' And having rebounded from 
the Unknowable to the Unknown, and from the Un- 
known to the unknown, thus putting the Infinite 
Energy in the same relation to us as the multiplica- 
tion table to an infant, he makes the complacent re- 
flection : 4 Thus viewed, the attempt, so to speak, to 
put a little unction into the Unknowable, is hardly 
worth the philosophical inaccuracy it involves.' 
Certainly the attempt to put any unction into Mr. 
Frederic Harrison's unknowable is worth nothing 
at all. He takes up the coronation robe of Mr. 
Spencer, pulls off the royal velvet and substitutes a 
piece of rusty alpaca, rips out the silken lining and 
replaces it with wool-batting, bastes over the ermine 
a fringe of frayed altar-lace, then shakes out the gar- 
ment briskly, and, surveying it at arm's length, 
thoughtfully declares, 4 Thus viewed, a coronation 



202 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

robe is hardly worth the misfit it involves.' The 
robe which Mr. Harrison holds up to ns is indeed 
the same old tatterdemalion tunic of Positivism 
that he has been puckering at these ten years, and 
the sooner he passes it out to the image-vender the 
better ; but this is not at all the garment, fabric or 
fashion, which was wrought by the superbly con- 
stant skill of Mr. Herbert Spencer. 

1 So stated, the Positive Creed of Agnosticism 
still retains its negative character.' Without doubt, 
anything stated as the direct opposite of what it is, 
will ever retain the negative character of not being 
itself. Five times five stated as four times four, will 
always lie open to the suspicion of not being twenty- 
five. 

This malign belittling seems to have fastened itself 
as a habit upon Mr. Harrison, and to pass current 
with him for both wit and logic. ' Mr. Spencer will 
not say that his Unknowable may not be conscious (as 
it might be a gooseberry).' This is not brilliant. It 
is not even smart. It is not a telling point. It is 
flippant, it is coarse, and it is nothing more. 

Mr. Spencer affirms that man is constantly moved 
'to imagine some solution of the Great Enigma, which 
he knows cannot be solved.' This, Mr. Harrison, as 
his manner is, vulgarizes into ' an ever-present conun- 
drum to be everlastingly given up,' and defends him- 
self for the Transformed Deformed by declaring that 
Mr. Spencer c uses words almost exactly the same.' 
So Canon Farrar might have reported at Westminster 
that General Grant had passed in his checks ; but it 



COMMENTS. 203 

would not have been witty, nor would it have made 
death ridiculous. 

This study of a problem recognized as insoluble, 
Mr. Harrison finds an imbecile task, a low and idle 
part to play : yet he can carry Positivism no further 
than to an 'endless progress towards a perfection never 
perhaps to be reached, but to be ideally cherished 
in hope.' Why is it less imbecile to be forever trav- 
elling towards a point you may never reach than to 
be forever working at a problem you can never 
solve ? 

But Mr. Harrison has graver faults than these. 
He is so eager to destroy the God whom he sees 
gazing upon him out of Mr. Spencer's philosophy, 
that, not content with reading a wrong meaning into 
Mr. Spencer's words, he changes the words them- 
selves. It is pretty bad when he speaks of ' Mr. 
Spencer's impersonal, unconscious, unthinking, and 
unthinkable Energy,' for Mr. Spencer distinctly 
disavows any such Energy ; but it is very bad in- 
deed when he violates the sanctity of quotation 
marks, and commits that unpardonable sin of discus- 
sion — misquotation. Charity might suggest that 
in describing the Energy as impersonal and uncon- 
scious, he was merely though severely suffering from 
imperfect apprehension ; but when he puts the words 
in quotation marks and declares that Mr. Spencer so 
describes it, he must give chapter and verse in which 
Mr. Spencer so describes it, in which Mr. Spencer so 
contradicts his own otherwise uniform testimony, or 
theology will cease to have recourse to what he stig- 



204 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HABRISON. 

matizes as 'seeking a refuge in the unintelligible,' 
and will say simply that Mr. Harrison has borne false 
witness against his neighbor. 

That it is a deliberate misrepresentation, and not a 
mere misunderstanding, is proved by the ' gooseberry ' 
witticism. There the same man who declares that 
Mr. Spencer describes the Unknowable as uncon- 
scious, declares that Mr. Spencer will not say that 
the Unknowable may not be conscious. It is the 
Harrison kind of man, and not the Spencer kind of 
man, who describes a thing as being at the same time 
conscious and possibly unconscious. 

In his extreme chagrin at finding that the Spen- 
cerian theory imposes upon the Universe a Creative 
Power, Mr. Harrison forgets not only his morals but 
his manners. He permits himself to point a sneer at 
Mr. Spencer's philosophy from personal acquaintance 
with Mr. Spencer and the knowledge thence derived 
of his private habits. Such a lapse is always to be 
regretted even in a crude social life, like that of our 
Republic. Yet when the sons of God present them- 
selves for an electoral contest, Satan does appear also 
among them, and in the boom and crush of battle 
commits this abomination ; but we are wholly unpre- 
pared to find it in the calm, highly-organized social 
life and the still more calm and more highly-organ- 
ized philosophical life of the Old World. An Israelite 
who avails himself of such weapons is hardly to be 
distinguished from a Philistine. 

Admitting — it is much to ask, but for the sake of 
the argument let us admit Mr. Harrison's peculiar 



COMMENTS. 205 

method ot procedure ; we find from it that Mr. 
Spencer's Energy is altogether insufficient as a basis 
of religion, as an object of worship. ' The points 
which the Unknowable has in common with the ob- 
ject of any religion are very slight and superficial.' 
' Its sole dogma is the infinity of nothingness.' • To 
make a religion out of the Unknowable is far more 
extravagant than to make it out of the Equator.' 
'The universal presence of the Unknowable (or 
rather of the unknown)' [thus Mr. Harrison corrects 
himself, having no clearer notion of the difference 
between the two than if he were a member of an 
Evangelical Church, in good and regular standing] 
'substratum is not a religion.' This, be it always 
remembered, is not Mr. Spencer's idea of the Eternal 
Energy. It is Mr. Harrison's rendering of Mr. 
Spencer's idea. He first plucks all the God-head out 
of it, and then complains that there is no god in it to 
worship. But we are going to admit that Mr. Spen- 
cer's Unknowable, though the God of theology by Mr. 
Harrison's admission, is, also by Mr. Harrison's asser- 
tion, a pure negation ; in spite of the fact that he 
has always been worshipped, as impossible to worship 
as the Equator, — what has Mr. Harrison to offer 
instead for our worship? 

'In any reasonable use of language,' he justly 
argues, 'religion implies some kind of belief in a 
Power outside ourselves, some kind of awe and 
gratitude felt for that Power, some kind of influence 
exerted by it over our lives. A religion which gives 
us nothing in particular to believe, nothing as an 



206 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

object of awe and gratitude, which has no special re- 
lation to human duty, is not a religion at all. It 
may be a formula, a generalization, a logical postu- 
late ; but it is not a religion.' Mr. Spencer's idea is 
too vague and vast for the human heart. Mr. 
Harrison wants something that shall reverence the 
hallowed name of religion, which has meant man's 
deepest convictions, his surest hopes, the most 
sacred yearnings of his heart; which can bind in 
brotherhood generations of men, comfort the father- 
less and the widow, uphold the martyr at the stake 
and the hero in his long battle. A mother wrung with 
agony for the loss of her child, or the wife crushed 
by the death of her children's father, or the helpless 
and the oppressed, the poor and the needy, men, 
women and children in sorrow, doubt, and want, long- 
ing for something to comfort them and to guide them, 
something to believe in, to hope for, to love, and to 
worship — they come to the philosopher and say, 
8 You men of science have silenced our old teachers. 
What religious faith do you give us in its place ; ' and 
the philosopher replies, ' Think on the Unknowable.' 
He considers that they might as well worship an alge- 
braic formula and pray to (x n ) ! 

What has Mr. Harrison to pray to instead ? 

Well, he admits, he avows at the outset, that he 
prays to nothing. What he recommends to these 
suffering men and women, orphans, and widows, to 
comfort them in sorrow and to build them up in right- 
eousness, is — the Religion of Humanity; ahd, that 
no injustice may be done, his exact words shall 



com:\ients. 207 

be quoted, with absolute observance of quotation 
marks. 

i A good man feels affection and reverence for his 
father and his mother ; he can cultivate that feeling 
and make it the spring of conduct. . . . Something of 
the affection, and more of the sense of brotherhood, 
which a man feels towards his own parents, he feels 
towards his famirv ; not a little of it even to his 
home, his city, or his province, and much of it 
towards his country. . . In that feeling there are 
elements of respect, elements of affection, and ele- 
ments of devotion, in certain degrees. That sense of 
respect, affection, and devotion can be extended 
wider than country. It can be extended, I say, as 
far as the human race itself. ... I maintain, our 
feeling for the human race must include what it has 
been as well as what it is to be. This is all that I 
mean by the religion of humanity.' 

4 The religion of Humanity, as I conceive it, is sim- 
ply morality fused with social devotion and enlight- 
ened by sound philosophy.'' 

And again, for Mr. Harrison never seems quite sat- 
isfied with his own verbiage, let us do him the justice 
to admit, ' the religion of Humanity, as we understand 
it, is nothing but the idealized sum of those human 
feelings and duties which all decent men acknowl- 
edge in detail and in fact. All healthy morality, as 
well as all sound philosophy, shows us that the sum 
total of all this mass of life is good, and is tending 
towards better. ... To soften and purify the masses 
of mankind we shall need all the passion and faith 



208 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

which are truly dignified by the name of religion — 
religious respect, religious sense of duty, religious 
belief in something vastly nobler and stronger than 
self. They will find this in the mighty tale of 
human civilization. ... It is a strength and comfort 
to all, whether weak, suffering, or bereaved, to feel 
that the whole sum of human effort in the past, as in 
the present, is steadily working, on the whole, to 
lessen the sum of misery, to help the fatherless and 
the widow, to assuage sickness, and to comfort the 
lonely. This is a real and solid encouragement, 
proved by all the facts of progressive civilization. . . . 
If it is not enough, it is at least all that men and 
women on earth have. Resignation and peace will be 
theirs when we have taught them habitually to know 
that it is all — when the promises of the churches 
are known to be false. ... In plain words, the Relig- 
ion of Humanity means recognizing your duty to 
your fellow man on human grounds.' 

The defect in Mr. Harrison's religion is the same 
which he finds in Mr. Spencer's — it is not religion. 
In its aspect of patriotism we are quite ready to 
hurrah for it as ' The Old Flag,' but as religion it is 
hardly even an old rag. 

It may be true, as Mr. Harrison affirms, that that 
which is a sound philosophical conclusion is not re- 
ligion ; but it does not follow that everything which 
is not a sound philosophical conclusion is religion. 
Mr. Harrison's most extraodinary position is, that 
the Power which produces Humanity is a mere nega- 
tion, with no working relation to Humanity ; but 



COMMENTS. 20 S 

Humanity itself is Positive and the only Positive. 
As a philosophical conclusion from all we know by 
observation and meditation, Humanity was created 
by an external Energy ; but as a practical religious 
fact Humanity created itself! 

Mr. Harrison characterizes Mr. Spencer's theory 
as the Ghost of Religion ; but Mr. Harrison's substi- 
tute is the Paper Doll of Religion. A ghost has at 
least the dignity of life. It inspires awe. It is mys- 
terious, uncomprehended if not incomprehensible, 
but this paper puppet is precisely what Mr. Har- 
rison's scissors make it ; lies where it is laid, and 
never by any chance stands alone ; has no more 
claim to adoration and no more chance for adoration 
than Bertha Blonde and Bessie Blue, flattened smooth 
at the bottom of their respective boxes beneath six 
layers of yellow gowns and red hats at one shilling 
the set. 

Positivism never looked more poverty-stricken 
than thus arrayed by one of its own apostles if not 
one of its creators. No opponent could give it a 
sorrier setting forth. It is incredible that any man 
born of woman into a world that pays honest labor 
a dollar a day, should spend his time in declaring, 
not without rhetorical embellishment, that a mother 
holding her dying child in her arms is to be consoled 
by the mighty tale of civilization — that a wife losing 
in the husband of her youth all that made life dear 
will find strength in reflecting that the whole sum 
of human effort is on the whole steadily working 
to lessen human misery ! To state it is enough. It 
defies refutation. 



210 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

Mr. Harrison is so thoroughly Positive that he ap- 
parently considers his own statements sufficient. 
Positivism, Jest moi. ' The religion of man in the 
vast cycles of primitive ages was reverence for Nature 
as influencing Man. The religion of man in the vast 
cycles that are to come will be reverence for Hu- 
manity as supported by Nature. The religion of 
man in the twenty or thirty centuries of Theology 
was reverence for the assumed authors or controllers 
of Nature.' Mr. Harrison speaks as confidently of 
these vast cycles as if he had walked through them 
all with a microscope ; but even taking him at his 
word, theology has the best showing. Better fifty 
years of the worship of the Author of both Nature 
and Man than cycles of the worship either of Nature 
or Man. 

The final religion of primitive man and of enlight- 
ened man, he continues, ' rest on the same elements, 
— belief in the Power which controls his life, and 
grateful reverence for the Power so acknowledged.' 
This sounds sensible and orthodox. But — 'the 
primitive man thought that Power to be the object 
of Nature affecting Man. The cultured man knows 
that Power to be Humanity itself controlling and 
controlled by nature. The transitional and perpet- 
ually-changing creed of Theology has been an inter- 
lude.' 

When the cultured man has cultured himself 
enough to understand the difference between^ know- 
ing and believing, he will be perceptibly in advance 
of Mr. Frederic Harrison. He strains at Mr. Spen- 



COMMENTS. 211 

cer's certainty of Creative Energ} r , but he swallows 
without wincing the certainty that Humanity, from 
a religious point of sight, created itself. The relig- 
ion of primitive man in the vast ante-historic cycles, 
of which we know little, and the religion of the cul- 
tured man in the vast future cycles, of which we know 
nothing, Mr. Harrison cites with equal confidence 
and respect ; but the religion of the only twenty or 
thirty centuries that we do know something about is 
of small account, a mere 'transitional interlude,' and 
wholly wrong at that. 

Mr. Harrison's protest against the Spencerian creed 
is, that ' to ordinary men and women, an unknowa- 
ble and inconceivable Reality is practically an Un- 
reality.' This I deny. I am ordinary men and 
women myself, thoroughly qualified to represent them 
by a profound, synthetic, and exhaustive ignorance 
of all science whatever, natural, metaphysical, theo- 
logical ; and they will surely say that to their ordi- 
nary comprehension an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 
by which all things are created and sustained, every- 
where present, is an infinitely more natural and 
possible object of worship than an intangible some- 
thing, which never had or professed to have any 
other existence than an idealized sum. It is easier 
even for the ordinary man and woman to adore 
the Unknowable than it is to adore the Know-that- 
it-isn't-able. What wonder that Mr. Harrison him- 
self, after rivalling the play-mother's perseverance 
in the endeavor to make his poor little beggarly god 
presentable by a pat here, and a pull there, a foot 



212 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

straightened out, and an arm pasted on, finally, with 
a misgiving of failure, and a presumable pang of dis- 
gust, gives it a petulant thrust, and says spitefully, as 
a fractious child may, if you don't like it you may 
lump it ! 'If it is not enough, it is at least all that 
men and women on earth have.' 

No, Mr. Harrison-. This is not all. 

Mr. Harrison reminds Mr. Spencer that in his relig- 
ion of the Unknowable he stands almost alone. And 
Mr. Harrison does this confronting a great cloud of 
witnesses who testify through the thirty or forty centu- 
ries of theology, that is, during all the time that we 
know most about, that whatever may have been the 
human error clinging to human presentation, the God 
of everything which the world recognizes as theology 
has been an Unknowable God: Unknowable not in 
the sense that you cannot know anything about him, 
but in the sense that you cannot know everything 
about him ; he cannot be comprehended within the 
circle of human knowledge. There is no other sense 
to the word Unknowable. Used as Mr. Harrison 
uses it, it is pure nonsense. If you cannot know any- 
thing about that which is unknowable, you cannot 
know that it exists ; and it is just as absurd in a phil- 
osophical conclusion as it is in a religious creed. If 
you can know nothing about it, you cannot know 
that it is unknowable. 

So far was this Unknowable from being a practical 
Unreality to men and women, ordinary and extraor- 
dinary, through the ages of theology, that the incon- 
ceivability of this Being was one of the avowed 



COMMENTS. 213 

reasons why men worshipped Him. They would 
not have reverenced Him if they had thought him 
such an one as themselves. They were not troubled 
with any misgivings as to His being a logical formula. 
They had a short way out of that perplexity. They 
put hands and feet to the abstraction, and brought it 
quickly into the realm of an illogical personality, it 
may be, but they at least kept quite clear of gener- 
alizing it into a universal postulate of philosophy; 
and a very inadequate presentation of the Absolute 
Being is better than an adequate and evem eloquent 
presentation of nothing whatever, and is no whit 
more illogical. Mr. Harrison will not deny that 
this imperfectly presented Being has been the work- 
ing God of theology through the twenty or thirty 
centuries over which he flits so blithely. It is by a 
Revelation from Newton Hall that we learn for the 
first time that Job and Isaiah and Paul were frittering 
away their adoration on a 'logician's artifice.' 'In 
homely words, such as the unlearned can understand, 
precisely what the religion of the Agnostic comes to,' 
— that is, what the religion of learned divines comes 
to — is the belief 'that there is a sort of a Some- 
thing, about which we can know nothing.' That is 
as near as Mr. Harrison comes to interpreting the 
theology of forty centuries. 

Mr. Harrison believes that he himself, on the con- 
traiy, stands ' alongside the religious spirits of every 
time and of every church in claiming for religion 
some intelligible object of reverence ; ' but he stands 
there only just long enough to present his claim. 



214 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

The moment they see that he is pulling his trumpery 
god out of his own pocket, all times and all churches 
know that it is not an object of reverence as a god, 
and not intelligible as anything, and the thanes fly 
from him. 

It is droll, and yet it is a little pathetic, and it is 
not a little irritating, to see how much trouble these 
ordinary men and women give Mr. Harrison. He is 
uneasy because Mr. Spencer's theory of the Absolute 
Being will not make good men and women out of 
common folk; but when Mr. Harrison reports Mr. 
Spencer as saying, * We are not concerned to know 
what effect this religious sentiment will have as a 
moral agent,' the honest, ordinary man and woman 
has only to turn to Mr. Spencer's words to see that 
this is not a philosophical postulate nor a logical 
formula, but a falsehood. That may not be what 
Positive Philosophy calls it, or even what the Syn- 
thetic Theses name it; but if Mr. Harrison in- 
sists on ' homely words, such as the unlearned can 
understand,' that is exactly what it is. For Mr. 
Spencer says no such thing as Mr. Harrison assumes 
to quote. Positive Philosophy must have had an 
uncommonly hard struggle with Mr. Harrison, or it 
must have very little grip in itself. It has certainly 
not succeeded in making him truthful. It seems to 
have succeeded only in bringing him to a sufficient 
conscience of sin to be unwilling that Mr. Spencer's 
words and his own misquotations should be printed in 
the same volume for easy reference. Nor does it 
greatly improve the situation to observe that most of 



ccnniENTS. 215 

his verbal offences are committed in the interest of 
the ordinary man and woman. Mr. Harrison wor- 
ships Humanity quite too Positively when he makes 
a double-headed spook of that tolerably decent and 
intelligent, if vulgar couple, who have been worship- 
ping the Unknowable all their lives without in the 
least suspecting that it was ' theologico-metaphysical 
jargon.' 

Mr. Harrison makes merry over the Evolutionist's 
worship of the Unknowable as only appropriately 
or possibly represented by (^ 7l ), to whom a weak 
brother is fancied as crying, i O (V 1 ), love us, help us, 
make us one with thee ! ' But when Mr. Spencer 
shies a stone, exceedingly well aimed, at Mr. Har- 
rison's glass house, the crash seriously disconcerts 
him. The worship of (V 1 ) was purely imaginary, 
the work of Mr. Harrison's exuberant fancy ; but 
the Positivist's worship of Humanity has actually 
been regulated by ritual and practised by Com- 
tists — was, indeed, apparently organized by Comte. 
Yet, as Mr. Harrison himself never marches around 
with banners in a procession or says prayers to 
Humanit}', he thinks it hardly candid in Mr. Spencer 
to ridicule ' practices and opinions for which I have 
never made myself responsible.' What was it, then, 
in Mr. Harrison to ridicule opinions which Mr. 
Spencer never held, and practices which no one ever 
practised ? Mr. Spencer ridiculed a form of Positive 
worship which actually existed, after Mr. Harrison 
had invented a worship of the Unknowable in order 
to ridicule it. ' My argument was entirely indepen- 



216 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

dent of any religious ordinances whatever/ says Mr. 
Harrison. Not at all. It was not independent of 
the religious ordinances which he invented and 
which he put upon the lips of weak Agnostic brethren 
saying prayers to (V 1 ). 

It is amusing to see the promptness with which 
Mr. Harrison draws off from any discussion of Comte 
with Mr. Spencer, and then discusses him, as Lord 
Dundreary's bird flocked, all by himself. His reason 
for declining such discussion he gives with a ready 
coarseness which bespeaks ample resources in that 
direction, — that Mr. Spencer knows nothing what- 
ever of the writings of Comte! One may surely 
admire the courage which enabled Mr. Harrison to 
lift up his head, all battered with the merry broad- 
side which Mr. Spencer had poured on him from 
Comte's own stores, and gasp out that Mr. Spencer 
knows nothing of Comte ! Mr. Harrison's ideas of 
knowledge need clarifying. When he is pinned down 
subsequently by Mr. Spencer, he explains that by 
knowing nothing of Comte he means not knowing 
eve^thing. His Positivism and his Agnosticism 
have evidently become thoroughly mixed, and he 
takes M. Comte for the Ultimate Reality of whom he 
has been talking in a similar strain. 

His second reason for declining the discussion he 
more than intimates to be that Mr. Spencer could not 
understand Comte if he should try ! ' To find many 
things which seem paradoxical is . . . easy enough ; 
but to grasp the conceptions of Comte . . . seri- 
ously is labor of a different kind.' I should think 



COMMENTS. 217 

it must be. To take Corate seriously must require 
an altogether different kind of labor from any that 
Mr. Spencer has as yet accomplished. Mr. Harri- 
son hints that if he were not merciful and com- 
passionate he could show that Mr. Spencer is as 
irrational as Comte ! Let it be observed, however, 
that he prudently refrains from carrying out his 
vague threat. ' I have too much respect for Mr. 
Spencer to quote any one of these bits of philosophic 
daring.' But he has not too much respect to insinu- 
ate, not only without the slightest basis, but with 
every indication to the contrary, that Mr. Spencer 
has his facts selected to suit his theories — ' clippings 
made to order.' In this he not only wrongs Mr. 
Spencer, but reveals himself. He avows Mr. Spencer 
to be 'the only living Englishman who can fairly lay 
claim to the name of philosopher — the only man 
in Europe now living who has constructed a real 
system of philosophy.' But does not Mr. Harrison 
know that a man who selects such facts only as suit 
his theory has no claim whatever to the name of phi- 
losopher, and that any system founded on only a 
part of the known facts has no claim to be consid- 
ered philosophy? He confounds the philosopher 
with the advocate. 

Immediately, with his familiar toy-balloon rebound 
from a statement as soon as he has touched it, Mr. 
Harrison adds that Mr. Spencer's facts 'make for 
my view as often as any other ' ! That is, Mr. 
Spencer, with the best will in the world to shut out 
everything which does not make for his own theories, 



218 



THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 



has not perception enough to see what is for and what 
is against his own theories ; or, Mr. Harrison, having 
made his statement, instantly falls to and refutes it. 

One could find it in his heart to be vexed with Mr. 
Spencer for undertaking seriously to deny and to dis- 
prove this charge. It is not argument, it is assassina- 
tion ; but it is abortive. 

Mr. Harrison is as little disposed to enter the lists 
with Mr. Spencer in the matter of history as in re 
Comte — and inferentially for a similar reason, Mr. 
Spencer's ignorance! C I am not at all disposed to 
enter into any historical argument with Mr. Spencer. 
. . . Mr. Spencer is seldom regarded as having much 
to tell us within the historical field.' 

Compared with Mr. Harrison's easy flight across 
the countless centuries of the past and the future, 
Mr. Spencer must be admitted to be a slow coach. 
He does not begin history early enough to suit 
Mr. Harrison, and he falters long before he reaches 
that distant future held fast and firm with Mr. 
Harrison's glittering eye. Mr. Spencer feels his way 
back to a remote past when superhuman spirits were 
supposed to be within and behind Nature ; but this 
is not half far enough for Mr. Harrison. ' This is 
obviously an oversight. We have to go very much 
further back for the genesis of religion. There were 
countless centuries of time, and there were, and there 
are, countless millions of men for whom no doctrine 
of superhuman spirits ever took coherent form. . . • 
The religion. . . was the belief and worship not of 
spirits of any kind, not of any immaterial, imagined 



COMMENTS. 219 

being inside things, but of the actual visible things 
themselves — trees, stones, rivers, mountains, earth, 
fire, stars, sun, and sky. Some of the most abiding 
and powerful of all religions have consisted in elabo- 
rate worship of these physical objects treated frankly 
as physical objects, without trace of ghost, spirit, or 
god.' 

Yet Mr. Harrison, a page or two further on, de- 
clares that 4 religion is not a thing of star-gazing and 
staring. . . . The mountain, sun, or sky which un- 
tutored man worships is thought to have some vital 
quality, some potency of the kind possessed by or- 
ganic beings.' 

So then it seems that physical objects were not 
treated frankly as physical objects ; but that they 
had a very strong trace of spirit inside them, which 
is very nearly what Mr. Spencer says. Mr. Harrison 
will always know a great deal more history than Mr. 
Spencer, because he knows it all around and both 
sides alike. To be or not to be is the alternative 
with Mr. Spencer. To be and not to be is Mr. Har- 
rison's quick solution of every problem. Mr. Spen- 
cer can only step cautiously from one stone of truth 
to another, as he finds them ; and of course he goes 
not fast or far. Mr. Harrison pyrotechnics over 
stone, morass, hassock, swamp — stumble, tumble, 
crash, or splash, it is all one to him ; he is in a state 
of preternatural activity all the time, and it never 
seems to occur to him that he is not getting ahead ; 
he thinks on the contrary that this is the natural, 
calm gait of the true philosopher. Certainly, compar- 



220 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

ing his effusive information, thus procured, about the 
vast cycles of primitive ages and the vast cycles that 
are to come, with whose religion he is perfectly con- 
versant — and, by the way, it happens to be the 
Harrisonian — and the twenty or thirty paltry in- 
terluding, not to say interloping, centuries of the- 
ology? — Mr- Spencer has not much to tell us within 
his narrow historical field ; but what little he has to 
say is historical. 

Mr. Harrison protests that ' Mr. Spencer has given 
a quite exaggerated sense to what we mean by Relig- 
ion and Humanity, by attaching to these ideas theo- 
logical associations.' But Mr. Harrison himself dressed 
them up in theological associations. That is all 
there is of them. Mr. Harrison's religion has noth- 
ing religious about it except the terminology which 
he borrows wholesale from the old religions and the- 
ologies that he discards. ' In any reasonable use 
of language,' he says truly, 'religion implies some 
kind of belief in a Power outside ourselves ; ' and 
then he proceeds to construct this Power out of his 
father and mother, if they were decent people, and a 
great many others who were anything but decent 
people in many ways, and calls it Humanity, and pro- 
ceeds to worship it. But in no reasonable use of 
language is Humanity a Power outside ourselves. 
Humanity is ourselves. 

' There are always in some sort these three ele- 
ments,' he says, 'in religion — belief, worship, con- 
duct.' Now hard hit by Mr. Spencer's Comtean arrow, 
though hurled by an ignorant hand, he avows him- 



COMMENTS. 221 

self ' ready to give up the word " worship " if that is 
a stumbling-block,' by explaining that he has ' no 
wish to " worship " Humanity in any other sense than 
as a man may worship his own father and mother ; ' 
and that is no sense at all. What is all the trouble 
about? We love our fathers and mothers, but we 
know that we do not worship them. Still less do we 
worship other people's fathers and mothers, or all the 
fathers and mothers in the vast and countless cycles 
of the past. ; The roots and fibres of religion are to 
be found in love, awe, sympathy, gratitude, conscious- 
ness of inferiority and dependence, community of 
will, acceptance of control, manifestation of purpose, 
reverence for majesty, goodness, creative energy, life.' 
This is all borrowed from the religion of theology. 
These terms belong to God and to God alone. They 
belong to the Unknowable, known to hold in essence 
and puissance all that is and all that can be of good- 
ness and of power, of beneficence and of logic. 
They are idle words applied to the human race. 
They are idle words, not to say servile words, as ap- 
plied to our attitude towards any man or any num- 
ber of men. Regarding whom have we consciousness 
of inferiority ? President Cleveland ? On whom have 
we consciousness of dependence ? Queen Victoria ? 
From whom do we accept control ? Governor Robin- 
son? Whose majesty do we reverence ? Mr. Brown- 
ing's ? Or all the Brownings and Bismarcks and kings 
and kaisers of past and future, the political conven- 
tions of Saratoga, the theological council of Nice ? 
But a mob is no more worshipful than one man. In 



222 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

the United States we believe in the majority, but we 
do not worship it. We discipline it. No sooner is 
the majority seated in its proper place of power than 
we give ourselves no rest till we have pulled it down. 
In no reasonable use of language do we feel any re- 
ligious awe or religious gratitude towards even the 
best men culled from the very best of the human 
race. We know them. We have gone in and out 
with them, living and dead. Their names are a 
household word. Their beloved faces are a house- 
hold presence. Home is not home without them. 
And while love is a cold and weak word for the 
affection which they inspire, religion is no word 
at all. 

Mr. Harrison has two ways of constructing a Re- 
ligion of Humanity ; one is to clothe Humanity with 
all the attributes of Deity ; the other is to unclothe 
Religion of everything that makes it religious. But 
each is a matter of words. Not a fact is changed. 
Man does not become God and God does not become 
man. 

We have too many instances of wrong-doing 
among the worshippers of the Unknowable, to lay to 
Mr. Harrison's defective theology his small respect 
for qualities which we have been accustomed to 
regard as of the highest value, indeed indispensable 
to scholars, gentlemen, not to say Christians — jus- 
tice, truth, honest dealing. Every one, warm in 
defence of his own theory, is too apt to seize the 
first weapon that comes to hand; but Mr. Harrison's 
apparent indifference as to whether his weapon be 



COMMENTS. 223 

a major premise or meadow-mud, and the actual pre- 
ponderance of meadow-mud in his argument, we may 
charitably attribute to the belittling influence of his 
puppet-god. 

Mr. Spencer, in demonstrating the impossibility of 
feeling gratitude towards the ' Great Being Human- 
ity,' because there is no such Being, presents his 
opponent as saying 'But surely "veneration and 
gratitude" are due somewhere. Surely civilized 
society, with its complex arrangements and involved 
processes . . . must be credited to some agency or 
other. If the " Great Being Humanity," considered 
as a whole, has not created it for us, . . . how hap- 
pens it that such benefits have been achieved, and to 
what shall we attribute achievement of them?' 

To which he makes answer, ' If " veneration and 
gratitude" are due at all, they are due to that Ulti- 
mate Cause from which Humanit}^, individually and as 
a whole, in common with all other things, has pro- 
ceeded. ... If we take the highest product of evo- 
lution, civilized society, and ask to what agency all 
its marvels must be credited, the inevitable answer 
is — to that Unknown Cause of which the entire 
Cosmos is a manifestation.' 

And then follows a passage of singular beauty, dig- 
nity — and shall I not say piety? — in which he shows 
the unreasonableness of worshipping the creature 
rather than the Creator. I make no apology for 
quoting it entire, since no pages could be better 
occupied : — 

4 A spectator who, seeing a bubble floating on a 



T 



224 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

great river, had his attention so absorbed by the 
bubble that he ignored the river — nay, even ridi- 
culed any one who thought that the river, out of 
which the bubble arose and into which it would pres- 
ently lapse, deserved recognition — would fitly typify 
a disciple of M. Comte, who, centring all his higher 
sentiments on Humanity, holds it absurd to let either 
thought or feeling be occupied with that great stream 
of Creative Power, unlimited in Space or in Time, of 
which Humanity is the transitory product. Even if, 
instead of being the dull leaden-hued thing it is, the 
bubble Humanity had reached that stage of irides- 
cence of which, happily, a high sample of man or 
woman sometimes shows us a beginning, it would 
still owe whatever there was in it of beauty to that 
Infinite and Eternal Energy out of which Humanity 
has quite recently emerged, and into which it must, 
in course of time, subside. And to suppose that this 
relatively-evanescent form of existence ought to 
occupy our minds so exclusively as to leave no space 
for a consciousness of that Ultimate Existence of 
which it is but one form out of multitudes — an Ul- 
timate Existence which was manifested in infinitely- 
varied ways before Humanity arose, and will be 
manifested in infinitely-varied other ways when Hu- 
manity has ceased to be, seems very straDge — to me, 
indeed, amazing.' 

The only way in which Mr. Harrison can meet 
this august and solemn presentation of Creative 
Power is to call it ' a tirade against mankind and 
human nature,' 4 a mere outburst of ill-humor,' ex- 



COMMENTS. 225 

hausting ' the terms of opprobrium for the collective 
notion of humanity.' c These emiment men have 
no words strong enough (for controversial purposes) 
to express their contempt for the human race. 
"Mankind" says Mr. Spencer, "is a bubble," "a 
dull leaden-hued thing " , . . Why, this is the raving 
of Timon of Athens ! ... To my mind all this is 
sheer nonsense. ... If Humanity be this mere bub- 
ble, the men and women that make it up must be 
equally worthy of our loathing and contempt.' For 
mankind outside 4 their own belongings and circles, 
they assert supreme contempt and dislike.' 

Certainly there is a part of mankind within Mr. 
Spencer's circle for whom he might feel a supreme 
contempt and loathing — contempt for a mind to 
which the loftiest unfolding of Infinite Power and 
Infinite Beneficence is sheer nonsense, loathing for 
a mind whose degrading misrepresentations are as 
continuous as they are revolting. For they may 
almost be said to make up the warp and woof of Mr. 
Harrison's argument. Summoned to adopt the Relig- 
ion of Humanity, Mr. Spencer mildly protests that 
he cannot feel a reverence for politicians who seek 
success irrespective of principle ; or adoration for the 
crowds who celebrate wholesale homicide in a war 
without cause. 'Not reverence,' he says, 'not admi- 
ration, not even respect, is caused by the sight of a 
hundred million Pagans masquerading as Christians.' 
And Mr. Harrison renders this into his mother- 
tongue thus : ' To Mr. Spencer, Europe presents noth- 



226 



THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 



ing but the revolting prospect of a hundred millions 
of Pagans masquerading as Christians ! ' 

4 1 cannot worship the Sun as pure light,' might 
Mr. Spencer say, 'for I see several dark spots on it.' 

1 Oho ! ' would Mr. Harrison cry out. ' Here 's a 
blind man indeed ! Mr. Spencer cannot see any 
thing in the sky but a great black spot ! ' 

Further than this — and if I seem to be pursuing 
the subject too minutely, let it be remembered that 
Mr. Frederic Harrison is the ablest English repre- 
sentative of Positivism, the strongest condemner and 
contemner of the 4 slip-slop ' of theology, a product of 
the highest literary culture and social order of the 
Old World ; and that the highest literary tribunals of 
England have accepted his malformation of Mr. 
Spencer's philosophy as the real Spencerian philoso- 
phy ! Further than this, therefore, let us patiently 
observe that, in spite of Mr. Harrison's own repeated 
declaration that religion requires some kind of awe 
and gratitude and veneration, in spite of the fact that 
in referring to this Mr. Spencer puts his reference in 
quotation marks, and in his reply dismisses the quo- 
tation marks, leaving them still and only around the 
quoted words, and says, 4 If " veneration and gratitude " 
are due at all, they are due to that Ultimate Cause,' 
Mr. Harrison ignores the quotation marks, ignores the 
4 if,' and affirms categorically : ' Mr. Spencer admits 
that veneration and gratitude are demanded some- 
where ! ' Nay, he even emphasizes the misstatement 
by the supererogative declaration, ' the words are not 
mine, but his.' And on this forged ' admission,' and 



COMMENTS. 227 

on his other equally baseless utterance that ' Mr. 
Spencer has nothing but contempt for the human 
race, ' he sweeps together a page or two of sentences, 
chiefly false and wholly impertinent, into a demon- 
stration of Mr. Spencer's 'singular slip in logic' 
And when his attention is demanded to what is un- 
happily far from being his own singular or single 
slip in truthfulness, he says, ' I certainly did misun- 
derstand Mr. Spencer, and that in all good faith.' If 
this is true, Mr. Harrison does not know how to read. 
The probability is that he has read so carelessly and 
thought so loosely and written so unconscientiously 
that he has really lost the power of seeing and saying 
things as they are. In this very paragraph, no sooner 
has Mr. Spencer, with an air of softly perplexed 
surprise, picked him up out of one quicksand, shaken 
him rough-dry, and set him on the bank in the sun- 
shine, than he promptly pitches headlong into an- 
other : ' Be it so. But if Mr. Spencer's view of 
religion is that veneration and gratitude have no part 
in it — ' There is no ' if ' about it ; Mr. Spencer said 
neither that veneration and gratitude were due nor 
were not due. He left that matter designedly and 
entirely undiscussed. What he said was, that, if they 
were due, they were due to the Creator, not to the 
created ; to the Producer, not to the product. 

To notice all Mr. Harrison's misrepresentations 
would be to rewrite his essays. Does Mr. Spencer 
say, ' Whatever components of the religious senti- 
ment disappear, there must ever survive those which 
are appropriate to the consciousness of a Mystery 



228 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRISON. 

that cannot be fathomed and a Power that is omni- 
present,' Mr. Harrison renders it into pigeon-Eng- 
lish as, ' Mr. Spencer represents the business of Relig- 
ion to be to keep alive the consciousness of a Mys- 
tery.' If Mr. Spencer should say, 4 Bodily life cannot 
exist without the circulation of the blood,' Mr. Har- 
rison would maintain that Mr. Spencer represents the 
business of life to be to keep the blood in circulation ! 
Mr. Spencer says, 'I am not concerned to show what 
effect religious sentiment as hereafter thus modified 
will have as a moral agent ; ' and Mr. Harrison again 
breaks into the sacred precincts of quotation marks, and 
changes this into, ' We are not concerned to know 
what effect this religious sentiment will have as a 
moral agent.' If Mr. Spencer had said, fc It is not my 
business to show whether Positive Religion leads 
naturally to falsehood,' the true Harrisonian inter- 
pretation would be, ' Mr. Spencer says it is nobody's 
business whether a Positive Philosopher speaks truth 
or falsehood.' 

This level of thought and this habit of speech are 
the signs of an untrained mind, whether that mind be 
editing a daily newspaper in New York City or writ- 
ing Comtean essays in Westbourne-terrace. 

And Mr. Harrison sits in the seat of the scornful, 
high above the i slip-slop ' which he attributes to theo- 
logians. It cannot be denied that theology was set 
for the fall and rise again of many in Israel*; but 
never her votaries slipped in a more treacherous slop 
than that wherewithal Mr. Harrison overspreads his 
helpless pages. She would not have preserved her 



COMMENTS. 229 

centre of gravity through the thirty or forty centu- 
ries of interlude which Mr. Harrison kindly allows 
her, if Heaven had vouchsafed no firmer standing- 
ground than the Representative Positivist supplies 
to those who venture within the enchanted circle of 
his logic. Not without reason does Mr. Harrison 
resent the charge of changing front. To him who 
has no stable earth beneath his feet, and no arching 
heavens to win his seeking eyes ; who looks for evi- 
dence only in the countless cycles of the unknown 
past, and for fruition only in the countless cycles of 
the unknown future, the establishment of anything 
so tangible as a front, the preservation of anything so 
palpable as a foothold, must seem but as the whim- 
sical endeavor of one who beateth the air. 



THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST, THE SON 
OF GOD. 

Accompanying Mr. Spencer, we trace the slow, 
careful, difficult footsteps of Science. With him we 
go as far as human powers can go. He takes us to 
the outmost bounds of matter. Through the whole 
swing of the Universe, through all the flux and re- 
flux of atoms, the ever-changing and ever-adjusting 
rhythm of worlds, we arrive with him at the conclu- 
sion that that which persists unchanging in quantity, 
but ever-changing in form, is Absolute Being — 
though it transcends human knowledge and concep- 
tion; is Ultimate Reality, the necessary datum of 
every thought ; is Self-Existence, a belief in which 
has among our beliefs the highest validity of any. 

Thus Mr. Sp>encer gives us all the religion that can 
be given or gotten out of nature ; and it is good. It is 
strong, solid, wholesome, far-reaching, all-comprehend- 
ing. To have wrested this absolute certainty from the 
wide realm of mind and matter, to have thus acutely 
interpreted the manifold voices of nature, is a trium- 
phant achievement of the human mind. But the Eter- 
nal quality of the human mind is in nothing more 
apparent than in its utter dissatisfaction with this 

230 



COMMENTS. 231 

achievement. Its most marked result is to create an 
unquenchable thirst for more. Humanity refuses to 
be confined within its own narrow limits. Not only 
does the heart cry out for some strong, sure stay ; 
but the mind in its highest development bounds up- 
ward, and will not be restrained. Mr. Spencer him- 
self avows that the mystery of the old ignorance 
is as nothing to the mystery of the new knowledge. 
The bewilderment of the savage is surpassed by the 
bewilderment of the savant. What increase of 
knowledge has done for us is immeasurably to en- 
large the sphere of our ignorance. 

But the human intellect has touched its outmost 
verge in arriving at a consciousness of the Infinite 
Energy. If that Energy is to be further known to 
the human beings which it has produced, itself must 
make the overtures ; for man cannot by the most 
rigorous searching find it out. 

There is a group of traditions, gathered from points 
far apart in time and space of the world's experience, 
and cherished by a wide and deep conviction at the 
present moment, that these overtures have been made. 
Many of their traces and records are not here under 
discussion ; but those which are of the highest repute 
and of the greatest acceptance to the Caucasian race 
to-day, have come down to us through Hebrew and 
Greek transmission, and are gathered into one book, 
which we call the Bible. The knowledge imparted 
by this book is called by those who accept it Revela- 
tion. These records have survived the roughest hand- 
ling and the greater peril of kindness. They have 



232 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

been cherished and guarded with a care and with a suc- 
cess unparalleled in the world's history. They have 
been attacked with a ferocious malignity. They have 
been defended with a lunacy of unreason. They 
have been translated, and interpreted, and perverted 
by generations of ignorance and of learning, of self- 
will and of benevolence, of devotion and of cruelty. 
Yet it is hardly too much to say that the gospel they 
bear ministers to the world all that it has of the 
larger hope and the clearer faith — the best of the 
life that now is, the most of the life that is to come. 

Very little of the ground dug over by Science is 
touched in this Revelation. Yet at a few points of 
contact we discern a marked and significant corre- 
spondence. 

Science, as presented by Mr. Spencer, agrees with 
the Bible : — 

That all things proceed from an Infinite and Eter- 
nal Energy : In the beginning God made the 
heavens and the earth. 

That creation, whether or not by evolution, was 
successive, and not simultaneous: In six days the 
Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that 
in them is. 

That man is the latest product of the process of 
creation : God created man and ended his work 
which he had made. 

That the Infinite Energy is omnipresent, man be- 
ing ever in its presence : Whither shall I go from thy 
Spirit, and whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 

That the External, Infinite, Creative Energy and 



- COMMENTS. 233 

the Internal, Finite, Created Energy are of the same 
substance : God made man in his own image. 

That, while all creation is a manifestation of this 
Infinite Energy, into man, the last product of evolu- 
tion — assuming creation to have been by evolution — 
was introduced a quality of the Infinite Energy, 
a consciousness^ which was not introduced into any 
previous product of evolution, and which differenti- 
ates him from every previous product ; so that while, 
like clod and plant and beast, he is a part, though 
the concluding part, of evolution, and therefore kin 
to them, he has a certain other quality which is not 
in them, and which permanently and fundamentally 
separates his nature from theirs. Of no other crea- 
ture than man can philosophy say, and no other 
creature than man can say, that the Power manifested 
throughout the Universe distinguished as material is 
the same Power which wells up in himself under the 
form of consciousness: And the Lord God formed 
man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his 
nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living 
soul. 

That this Energy is too great, vast, illimitable for 
man's intelligence to comprehend; is unknowable: 
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is high ; 
I cannot attain unto it. 

Here Science stops; but man craves further ad- 
vance. He has never been willing to accept any 
boundary line. The living soul has always aspired 
towards its Source, towards the Self-Existence whence 
it derived existence. This Bible tells us that the 



234 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

Infinite Energy recognized and gratified this longing. 
The Infinite clothed itself in finiteness, lent itself to 
a human personality, brought itself purely and for 
ever down to the grasp of human comprehension ; 
and this not as an afterthought, to repair the defects 
of an original, imperfect creation, but as a part of the 
original plan of creation for the perfecting of this 
final product of evolution — man; by his develop- 
ment out of the material world, in which he was 
created, into the spiritual world, for which he was 
created. 

Does Mr. Spencer say that this is impossible? 
But Mr. Spencer says that 'beyond the phenomenal 
order of things our ideas of possible and impossible 
are irrelevant.' The Bible writers maintain the same 
position as valiantly as Mr. Spencer. ' With God all 
things are possible. The things which are impossible 
with man are possible with God.' With God, they 
declare, in full Spencerian measure, nothing shall be 
impossible. Matthew and Luke stand on each side 
of Herbert Spencer to stay his hands on the doctrine 
of the irrelevancy of our words possible and impos- 
sible as applied to the Infinite Energy. 

But still more definitely Mr. Spencer hews out of 
the solid rock a solid basis for this Revelation. Mr. 
Spencer asserts as a result of reasoning that this In- 
finite and Eternal Energy, while unchanging in quan- 
tity, is ever changing in form, and is capable of 
assuming all forms. By his own logical canons, 
then, he is debarred from saying that it cannot take 
upon itself the form of man and become obedient 



COMMENTS. 235 

unto death, even the death of the cross. I do not 
know that he wishes to say it; but whether he 
wishes it or not, he cannot say it without disowning 
his own laws. 

No one will deny that if the Infinite Energy did 
thus present itself, it supplied a sore and universal 
need of human nature, as well as one which Science 
is not able to meet. All history shows that man 
was made to adore. History and science alike show 
that he was made to adore something other and 
greater than himself, and that yet it must be a 
personality ; for what is beyond personality cannot 
be brought within the limits of his conception. 
This instinct of adoration, of adequate expression, is 
as much a manifestation of the Eternal Energy as is 
a stone or a star, or Humanity itself. It was the 
Infinite Energy which made man too limited to em- 
brace it in his scope, yet too large and like to be 
unconscious of its existence or satisfied without its 
constant communication. 

It is unquestionable that certain minds of excep- 
tional power are able to see the Invisible in the things 
that do appear, to adore the Eternal Power and 
Godhead from the creation of the world. In manly 
humility, in devoutness of ascription, in conscientious 
waiting upon the Eternal Creative Power, and patient 
search of his ways and works, neither the writers of 
the Old Testament nor the New exceeded their 
modern coadjutor, Mr. Herbert Spencer; and if it 
was the Hoty Ghost which moved their utterance, full 
holy also is the Spirit which has touched his lips with 
sacred fire. 



236 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

But just as unquestionably the mass of mankind is 
hardly able thus to approach God — to find him, to 
worship him. Two recourses man has : one is to 
invest God with the attributes of Humanity; the 
other is to invest Humanity with the attributes of 
God. 

Mr. Frederic Harrison chooses the latter. He 
perceives the Infinite Energy, but he turns his back 
on it. He will have none of it. It may serve for a 
philosophical conclusion ; but as religion, as an object 
of worship, he will none of it. He chooses rather to 
4 loaf and invite his soul.' He prefers to make up a 
religion of his own out of men and women ; and a 
very poor religion it is — grotesque, arid, absurd. 

Mankind in general has adopted the other recourse. 
It has promptly ignored the ill instability of God, and 
has simply and frankly limited Him — Jew and Gen- 
tile alike. The tendency to personify, to personalize, 
was so strong that in the rude and childish ages man 
was not content with words but made images of God, 
personified the Infinite in wood and stone. The 
early history of the Jewish people is the story of a 
steady fight against this tendency. The Hebrews 
had constantly to be dragged up from their knees 
before graven images of the Eternal Energy, and with 
sword and fire the truth had to be driven into their 
dull brains that the Eternal Energy was one God, 
was not to be represented even, by graven images. 

As the character of a people became exalted and 
spiritualized, it rejected the lower representations and 
centralized on the higher. From graven images to 



COMMENTS. 237 

anthropomorphism was a great step forward in the 
evolution of religion. From representation to the 
eye by wood and metal to representation to the mind 
by terms of the human personality, was almost as far 
as man could go unassisted. Even Mr. Spencer ad- 
mits, asserts, that the philosophers' obscurity comes 
largely from the fact that they are dealing with infi- 
nite things and have only finite words to express 
them. The External Energy can only be conceived 
in terms of the Internal Energy. With the same 
difficulty grappled the prophets of old ; only the strug- 
gle was shorter. Where Mr. Spencer searches the hid- 
den galleries of thought for the most abstract words, 
Abraham reasons with the Infinite Energy as if it 
were an Arab sheikh ; where Mr. Spencer says, ' The 
process of integration combines with the process of 
differentiation to render this change not simply from 
homogeneity to heterogeneity, but from an indefinite 
homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity,' Moses says, 
triumphantly, The Lord is a man of war ! To Mr. 
Spencer this must seem a very gross representa- 
tion of the Ultimate Being ; but his presentation would 
have seemed to the Hebrews as idle wind. Mr. Spencer 
would never have got them through the Red Sea if 
he had had nothing better to coax them along with 
than his homogeneities and his heterogeneities. But 
with it all Moses only did what philosophers are 
doing and must do. He expressed the External En- 
ergy in terms of the Internal Energy. When he 
stood scared and victorious on the shores of the sea 
which had swallowed up his fierce-pursuing foe, and 



238 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

cried exultantly, Thy right hand hath dashed in 
pieces the enemy ! that was his term of the Internal 
Energy — and not a bad term under the circum- 
stances. It was not so near the kingdom of heaven 
as that other term, He that saveth his life shall lose 
it, and he that loseth his life for my sake, the same 
shall find it ; but the evolution of religion was in its 
earliest stages. Absolute Being is obliged to respect 
the limitations which itself has imposed. These 
limitations prevail not only in religion, but in science 
as rigidly. The growth of the idea of God in the 
human mind, and the growth of the idea of the Cos- 
mos, and the growth of the Cosmos itself from the 
primal atom, have been by slow stages. It was no 
more grotesque or unreasonable for the sacred writers 
to ascribe hands and feet to the Self-Existence than 
it was for scientific writers to put this round world 
on the back of a tortoise. It was far less unscientific ; 
for the language of the Bible is often palpably pic- 
torial and poetic, and does not expect to be taken 
literally — while the tortoise philosophers seem actu- 
ally to have thought they had made a point. The 
very terms of the story of the garden of Eden show 
that it was an allegory. The garden of God is an 
anthropomorphic figure, but its fruit was life and 
knowledge. I have seen God face to face, said Jacob 
at Peniel ; and the Lord spoke unto Moses face to 
face in the tabernacle, as a man speaketh unto his 
friend. We have no right to misunderstand, for 
scarcely is the ink dry upon the confident pen before 
the Lord himself is made to say, There shall no man 



COMMENTS. 239 

see me and live. If the language of the Bible is to 
be interpreted as if it were the phraseology of a nine- 
teenth century lawyer's brief, not only is Moses un- 
able to stand the scrutiny of the philosophers, but he 
will be brought to grief by the Sunday-school scholars. 

Mr. Spencer himself fully recognizes the gradual 
advance of human intelligence from and by anthro- 
pomorphic to spiritual conceptions of God; and it 
keeps step with the general moral advance of the 
human race, and not in the rear. Most persons would 
now be shocked by pictures of God the Father as an 
aged man with bald head and white abundant beard. 
Only the most uneducated find the bambino an aid 
to devotion ; but there are very few even of the in- 
tellectual or the spiritual who perceive that omni- 
science is but pure logic, or that fatherhood and 
motherhood deeper than a function of nature, repre- 
sent a quality of character. 

But while idols were to be destroyed, and while 
man was mounting from the lower to the higher 
human qualities in descrying attributes of God, the 
need of personality to his conceptions remained in- 
herent in his nature. What is then more reasonable 
than that the Absolute Being should manifest himself 
in a personality ? This would be an achievement 
which would remove all difficulties. The sum of 
human effort is scarcely more than a minus quantity. 
The Infinite Energy of Mr. Spencer is immanent, 
but incomprehensible, beyond the touch of man for 
solace or sympathy. The Indefinite Inexistibility 
of Mr. Harrison's and M. Comte's manufacture has 



240 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

no shadow or symbol nor certitude nor peace nor 
help for pain. Beyond the realm of personality 
the great masses cannot go. But if the Infinite 
did communicate itself through the finite, if, by a 
way which we know not, the Impersonal became 
personal, the language of personality becomes in- 
stantly appropriate. That Jesus which is called the 
Christ, which called himself the Son of God, did, 
we are told, so ally himself to us on the human 
side, while being himself so allied with the Abso- 
lute Being on the eternal side, that through him 
and in him we are forever put into communication 
with the Absolute Being, the Invisible God. While 
yet with the Philosophers, with Moses, with the 
Evangelists, no man can see God at any time ; 
with this Evangel and in it, the only begotten Son 
which is in the bosom of the Father hath declared 
him, so that man can not only look upon God in 
Christ, but because he can look upon God he shall 
live forever. In him is life. Because I live, ye shall 
live also. How this alliance was compassed we do 
not know. Dimly to the human mind, in many ages 
and nations, the fact of such an alliance, its possi- 
bility and its desirability, seem to have been fore- 
shadowed ; and the earnest expectation of the crea- 
ture waited for this manifestation of the Creator. But 
no Revelation has concerned itself to inform us by 
what unknown though not unnatural laws God was 
able to manifest himself in and through a«human 
nature. There is but the simple assertion that God 
was manifest in the flesh. The Revealer appears to 



COMMENTS. 241 

think that a solution of the mystery is not of the 
slightest consequence. He lays down the law which 
Mr. Spencer has lately re-enacted, that with God all 
things are possible. He affirms that in this Christ 
dwelletli all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, that 
is, all of the Godhead that could dwell in human 
body. He assures the questioner that what thou 
knowest not now thou shalt know hereafter — and 
that is all. To the Infinite Energy it is no mystery, 
but a part of the natural order of the Universe. To 
us it seems a mystery because the law under which 
it comes lies outside the sphere of our common ob- 
servation. But a mystery seen but once is no more 
mysterious than a mystery seen many times. A 
mystery is not less a mystery by being repeated. 
We see a constantly recurring mystery, and we call 
it the order of nature ; and rest on our oars as if 
that explained it, whereas it explains nothing. But 
this alliance of the Divine with the human is no 
more mysterious than the emanation of the human 
from the Divine. Christ is but one and men are 
myriads ; but of all the myriads, not one has ever 
known how it was or when it was that the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty gave him understanding. 

If it is true, the want of Humanity is supplied. If 
the Inscrutable has put himself within the limits of 
our scrutiny, if Jesus was indeed the Christ, God 
manifest within the circle of our love and fear and 
hope and help, why then we have eveiything which 
Philosophy misses, everything that Positivism was 
invented for, everything which the human heart has 



242 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHEIST. 

craved. We have no need of Comte ; for a greater 
than Comte is here, and in Comte's oWn line. Comte 
is commended because he would lift the lowly, and 
correct the besetting sin of the philosopher and the 
man of power. But the Infinite Energy became 
Emanuel, God with us, God with the lowly, to do 
that very thing for the whole world, to seek and to 
save that which was lost. To suffering souls the 
Positivist says, Read the mighty tale of human civil- 
ization; but St. Paul cries out, with a theological 
ring to be sure, but the ring of confidence and exul- 
tation : These light afflictions, which are but for a 
moment, shall work out for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory. That is consolation. 
We can bear everything for a moment. My grace is 
sufficient for thee ! Whose grace ? The grace of 
the Eternal Energy, by whom we are created and 
sustained, and who knows what is sufficient. To the 
poor and the needy the compassionate Positivist says 
pitifully : The whole sum of human effort is steadily 
working, on the whole, to lessen the sum of human 
misery. But to them Jesus, which is called the 
Christ, Emanuel, God with us, stretches out arms of 
love and calls, Come unto me all ye that labor and 
are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. In my 
Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare 
a place for you. I will not leave you comfortless, I 
will come unto you. Unto you, not unto some, 
future, unknown generation. To him who suffers, 
peace ; to the heavy-laden, rest : not to some later 
being who will not suffer or be heavy-laden. ' But 



COMMENTS. 243 

this is egoism,' says the altruist. Yes, and it has 
the great merit of not falsely pretending to suppress 
egoism. But it is an egoism and the only egoism 
which goes hand in hand with the loftiest altruism ; 
for it is an egoism which continually admonishes to 
purify and perfect one's self for and by the service of 
Humanit}^ and for and by alliance with its Source ; 
and it is an egoism to which is presented for its eter- 
nal model the highest form of human life, the em- 
bodiment of the Infinite in the finite, the perfect and 
final example of utter self-sacrifice, the All-Powerful 
subjecting himself to weakness, the All-Pure consort- 
ing with wickedness, the Creator mingling with the 
creature, that so he might be lifted into the possibility 
of Eternal Divine companionship. Oh ! the depth of 
the riches both of the wisdom and the goodness of 
God! 

Mr. Spencer tries, but vainly, to adhere to imper- 
sonality. Mr. Harrison, vowed to personality, re- 
stricts religion to Humanity. Revelation leaves to 
God his impersonality of the heavens, but for this 
world shows him manifest in Christ. The imma- 
nent Energy of Mr. Spencer is transfigured by the 
light of Revelation into the immanent Christ, patheti- 
cally believed in by the early Christians, too far for- 
gotten by the succeeding ages, but now returning to 
us once more through the ministrations of later apos- 
tles, and in the fulness of time, — the tender human 
elder brother who forever banishes loneliness with 
his 4 Lo ! I am with you always, even unto the end 
of the world ! ' 



244 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHEIST. 

There are Positivists who, unwilling to relinquish 
wholly the Infinite Creative Energy, yet positive to 
accept only what they see, are faltering into the sug- 
gestion that Humanity may be regarded as ' a Medi- 
ator between men and the Unknowable.' But this 
also is vanity. There is no Humanity apart from 
man. How can man be a mediator to himself? 
But Paul, taught by an inward way, understands 
the situation instantly and meets it reasonably: 
There is one Mediator between God and men, the 
man Christ Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. 

4 But it is untrue,' implies Mr. Harrison. ( The 
promises of the churches are known to be false,' 
would Mr. Harrison teach. Softly there, Mr. Harri- 
son. On a question of truth or falsehood the i bril- 
liant' Positivist is not authority. In this discussion 
we have seen that he abounds in misrepresentation, 
that he does not hesitate at false statement — or if 
he hesitates, he is lost. If he cannot be trusted at 
arm's length, can he be trusted at Heaven's length ? 
If he is false regarding his brother, whom he hath 
seen, will he be true regarding the Christ, whom he 
will not see ? 

Without touching the question of historical evi- 
dence, which is alien to this discussion, but which has 
nothing to lose by discussion, we have seen that the 
necessity of Revelation to any further knowledge of 
the Infinite Energy is demonstrated by Mr. Spencer's 
logic and by Mr. Harrison's religious gymnastics. Mr. 
Spencer proves it by arguing that it is impossible 
for man to construct a personal religion ; Mr. Harri- 



COMMENTS. 245 

son, by constructing one himself! But it is not un- 
reasonable, it is not a violation of the natural, to 
think that this Infinite Energy, which so lavished it- 
self in making the world ready for man, and in mak- 
ing man ready for the world, lavished itself with 
equal generosity in moulding the religious idea in 
man to higher and higher forms, until man was ready 
to receive the Christ, who concentrated in himself 
all personality and became forever the pure and suf- 
ficient object at once of human adoration and exam- 
ple — God manifest and so meet for worship, man 
and so meet for a model. Then was mankind ready 
to cast off anthropomorphism, and learn that God is 
a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him 
in spirit and in truth. 

Those who say that it is impossible, that it is un- 
reasonable, are the narrow minds, the unphilosophical, 
who are undertaking to measure the infinite by their 
own little yardsticks. I will not say is it impossible, 
but is it even unreasonable to believe that he or it — 
call it by whatever name — who is not too vast and 
far to make man, is not too vast and far to sustain 
and strengthen him at the point where he most 
needs sustenance and strength? If it is not too 
minute for the Infinite Energy to see that every 
sparrow is provided with light, hollow bones which 
he can bear through the air, is it weak and silly to 
suppose that not one of these shall fall to the ground 
without its Maker's notice? It seems impossible 
that any Being could have produced the illimitable 
Universes ; but the Universes are. Every law by 



246 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

which man makes every machine, from a pin to a 
steam-engine, is a law on which the stars are hung. 
Is it close logic to say that a small, and feeble, and 
clumsy machine must be made by mind, but a vast, 
complex, and mighty machine could be made by 
nobody — just oozed out of itself? This is a very 
awkward way for a journeyman mechanic to get rid 
of a master mechanic. A watch that tells time 
haltingly, that must be wound up every day, that is 
worn out in a few years — must that be projected 
by mind, while the eternal pendulum of the sun 
swings out from senseless dust ? A futile rose, laid 
in coarse colors, on coarse canvas, without fragrance, 
without life — must it be an artist's work? But the 
living rose, of an exquisite delicacy, of a matchless 
aroma, of a soft and glowing hue beyond the paint- 
er's art — behind that can be no Creator, only blind 
force ? No ; the miracle is here. We may refuse to 
accept, we may not be able to find any explanation 
of it, but we cannot explain it away. Revelation 
creates nothing. It only shows the Author of what 
is already created; and it shows, it defines, it de- 
scribes the same Author which Science has already 
found. 

Revelation claims nothing more wonderful than is 
classified by the man of science, than is seen by the 
man of ignorance. Turning water into wine, restor- 
ing the soul to its abandoned clav, are but childish 
and meretricious devices compared with the ever-re- 
curring, and therefore unrecognized miracles of life. 
The family, the calyx and corolla of the human soul, 



COMMENTS. 247 

is a more miraculous triumph of invention than all 
the comparative sleight-of-hand of loaves and fishes, 
if they were wrought once to arrest the attention of 
a rude and ignorant populace. Founded on the 
strongest, widest, noblest of human passions ; beset 
by deadly peril, yet diffusing an exquisite happiness ; 
susceptible of the lowest debasement, but adapted to 
the most exalted culture ; demanding constant self- 
sacrifice, yet demanding it so deftly that its offering 
seems the eager tribute of love, — the family institu- 
tion exhausts marvel as a device for compassing at 
'once the perpetuation, the happiness, and the elevation 
of the human race. It is inscrutable, it is to appear- 
ance in some aspects of a fiendish cruelty, it is only 
partially successful; if we could view it theoreti- 
cally, without any light from experience, we should 
say that it could not be successful at all, that it 
would be a total failure ; but what there is of best on 
earth is gathered in its bosom, and what there is of 
hope in Heaven finds there its type and- foretaste. 

And here, here, what Mr. Spencer sees through a 
glass darkly, appears face to face. He, indeed, avoids 
declaring himself on the beneficence of the Energy, 
but he lays down a principle which involves it. He 
teaches that the Infinite Energy contains in puissance 
whatever is and is to be manifested in the Universe 
of mind and matter and heart and soul. He admits 
also that the human race is ever rising. He will 
not deny that the ultimate, the prevailing, the one 
absolutely irresistible force in the world is love. Is 
it not then simply natural, philosophical, that God is 



248 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHEIST. 

love ? This, Revelation proclaims. This, Philosophy 
implies. Why, then, is it not reasonable to suppose 
that God so loved the world that he became manifest 
in the flesh to give to the world what it lacked? 
Infinite Energy is also, must be, Infinite Love. That 
Infinite Love should come to earth is no more improb- 
able than that Infinite Energy should have made the 
earth. That the Holy Spirit of Consolation should 
brood over all troubled hearts, is but a natural, a due 
part of the plan under which hearts are made — sus- 
ceptible of suffering, thirsty for happiness, weak to 
avoid the one or to compass the other. If one had 
come saying only: 'There is for your comfort a 
practical belief in something of which you know 
nothing ; ' ' The tale of civilization is mighty, and 
there is nothing greater than yourselves ' — why, the 
Jews would have sent him about his business none 
too quickly ; but Jesus came pointing out to a world 
needing to adore, the mighty God as a God of love, 
for adoration ; holding up to a world which could 
think and feel only in terms of personality, a person- 
ality perfect, yet possible of imitation ; to the hearts 
which he had made loving home and happiness, 
eternal happiness and a heavenly home ; stimulating 
always to duty, purity, and unselfishness, by appeals 
to every passion, every fear, every hope, which the In- 
finite Energy had implanted in the man which he had 
made. 

If the system of Christianity be a device of 'man, 
we might well turn Positivists and worship that man. 

Why the Infinite Energy should manifest itself by 



COMMENTS. 249 

stages, we do not know. It is as if, alike in evolving 
the religious idea in the human race and in evolving 
the human race itself — if indeed the perfect evolution 
of the religious idea be not the completion of the 
evolution of the race — as if the Creative Power 
were forced to hurry slowly, to advance step by step 
from lower to higher. It certainly cannot be, as it 
might appear, that the Creator is only learning 
the trade of creation, gradually perfecting himself 
through the lower for the higher organisms. No 
philosophy or anthropomorphism has ever suggested 
that. If creation has indeed been by evolution; 
whether it were a subjective evolution, the develop- 
ment of one species into another, or whether it were 
an objective evolution, the creation of one species 
after another ; whether, that is, evolution were in the 
organic law of the created, or whether it were solely 
in the idea of the Creator, — in either case we equally 
and clearly see that it must have been chosen because 
it was, on the whole, the best way ; certainly it is a 
most orderly way. Why theology should quarrel 
with it, no man knows. To descend from a beast 
cannot be undignified to him whom theology has 
always taught that he descended from a clod. A 
beast is a good deal higher up in the scale than a 
handful of dust. It is only that theology takes one 
leap from mud to mind, while science shows the 
gradual stages by which life mounted from mud to 
mind. Both begin and end at the same place. 

Science in its theory of evolution gives to the 
Rest-day of the Creator, the Sabbath of the world, 



250 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHEIST. 

its vast and sublime significance. The Jews held it 
to betoken their deliverance from Egyptian bondage, 
and every nation may secure it at will for whatever 
symbolism it wishes ; but science lifts it above all 
local and temporary incident into an atmosphere as 
broad as the earth, as old as the centuries, for it rep- 
resents the completed work of evolution. God pre- 
pared the earth for man through every stage of heat 
and cooling from the first impalpability to the last 
and highest animal organization, which received the 
Living Soul, and then God rested from all his work 
which he had created and made, and gave over the 
earth to the hands of man. Evolution is not hence- 
forth to create new species, higher organisms. Evo- 
lution is henceforth in the hands of man, to work on 
what species he will, to destroy one, to develop an- 
other, according to his own needs and conveniences, 
to conquer the earth and subdue it, to discover and 
utilize its hidden forces. Evolution henceforth is of 
man himself from his lower to his higher nature. It 
is to make the brute in himself secondary, the divine 
in himself primary. It is to keep the body under, the 
soul uppermost. God rests from his work of creation, 
but not from his work of salvation. For while man 
inherits the earth by divine bequest, and is hotly en- 
gaged in his work of subduing it, he may work out 
also and thereby his own salvation with infinite faith 
and hope, because it is God that worketh in him, 
drawing him ever upward. 

Wherever evolution comes within our own scope, 
we do not quarrel with it. First the blade, then the 



COMMENTS. 251 

ear, then the full corn in the ear, is the law of evolu- 
tion in the corn-field, and we do not call it weakness 
but wonder. First utter helplessness, then essaying 
feet, before the strong, sure step ; but who could 
spare the sweetness of the essaying feet ? How can 
that be a defect in large which is a charm in small ? 
The evolution of wisdom and virtue and strength 
from ignorance, innocence, and weakness is the 
evolution of love, patience, unselfishness, the most 
divine of human qualities, in those who minister to 
weakness. Through mistake and wilful wandering 
and feeble effort, through strife and blood and tears, 
the idea of God has evolved from man's first vague 
consciousness to this day, when we are at least dimly 
seeing that the long lane must have a turning, that 
the living soul is a different kind of product from 
that dust of the earth which has not received the 
divine in-breathing, that spiritual law reverses physi- 
cal law; that the lowly shall be exalted, that the 
strong must serve the weak, that self-surrender is the 
highest form of self-control, that human society 
should model itself on the human family, that the 
human family is the type of the social order of the 
spiritual world. For the Creative Power which re- 
veals itself to Mr. Spencer as Infinite Energy re- 
vealed itself through Jesus Christ as our Father, 
which art in Heaven. 

This, then, is what Revelation has done for us, — 
what we could not do for ourselves, what few 
could do in small degree, what most of us could 
not do at all. It has declared to us the Unknown 



252 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

God. Science rears his altar, and with the rever- 
ence born of wisdom inscribes thereon the Unknow- 
able name. Revelation declares his character, his 
designs, his fatherhood. Science speaks to the few, 
fitted by long watching and patient waiting to re- 
ceive the wondrous word. Revelation speaks to all 
— lowly, ignorant, toiling, suffering, the weary and 
the heavy-laden ; speaks not of things hard to be un- 
derstood, but of consolation, and hope, and stimulus, 
simple assurances that all need and all understand. 
Spiritual life and immortality are faintly hinted in the 
rocks, are foreshadowed in all organic life, are ur- 
gently demanded by the living soul, but are brought 
to light only through the Gospel. Revelation does 
not seek to exclude or to estop Science. It formu- 
lates no detailed system of the Universe. Only 
here and there, subservient to more pressing aims, a 
few large, majestic lines mark the trend of creation. 
A few firm guide-posts here and there may help the 
footsteps of ignorance, and confirm his right of way 
to the man of science as well. The sum of mystery 
is not lessened by Revelation any more than by Sci- 
ence. Lo these are parts of His ways ; but how little 
a portion is heard of Him ! When, either through 
Revelation or through Science, or through the two 
combined, one gets a glimpse of some new part of His 
ways, the sudden illumination floods the vision with 
so divine a radiance, that, dazzled and glorified, one 
fancies for a moment that he has seen the innermost 
Heavens, and he walks in glory and in joy. Though 
he be only following his plough along the mountain- 



COMMENTS. 253 

side, it becomes to hirn a true Mount of Transfigura- 
tion. But when his eyes are wonted to the new 
light, he sees that it shines only in a little circle 
around his own feet, a wider circle than before, a 
brighter light than of old, a true gleam, he believes, 
from the Infinite Heavens of the Unseen Universe, 
but leaving around him still an ever-widening realm 
of darkness, soft indeed and brooding not threaten- 
ing, but impenetrable. 

Neither evolution nor Revelation explains the Uni- 
verse, but evolution explains Revelation. Theology 
does not explain Revelation. Theology confuses 
Revelation. Evolution follows reason. Theology 
baffles, evades, if it does not defy reason. Theology 
makes creation a fatal mistake, Christ an imperfect 
reparation. And in saying this let me not be thought 
so foolish as to bring a railing accusation against the- 
ology, that noblest of sciences, one of the strongest 
powers of the world, whose savants have been mighty 
men of valor, whose gravest mistakes have been from 
too close pursuit of the reason's rigid command, whose 
hidden springs of religion have made a thousand wil- 
dernesses blossom as the rose. The evils wrought by 
theology have not been by want of thought or by 
want of heart. They are the mistakes, the errors, of 
the greatest minds grappling with the greatest 
themes, sensitive to the gravest responsibilities. 
They exist because of human limitations, because it 
seemed good to God that we should be here as in a 
darkening plain swept with confused alarms of strug- 
gle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. 



254 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHEIST. 

It would perhaps be truer to say the theology of 
evolution is a more reasonable thing than any pre- 
vious theology. It is more strictly in accord with 
the theology of Revelation than is the theology of the 
old divines ; and this is natural, for the theology of 
evolution and the theology of Revelation are but one 
remove from God. The one is a direct study of 
God in his Universe, the other is a direct study of 
God in Christ. The theology of the church is two 
removes from God; is founded on a study of the 
human medium through which Christ communicated 
himself to the world. In the first theologies, there- 
fore, the liability to error is reduced to its lowest 
terms. In the last, the theology of the church, there 
is an added element of error, an added possibility of 
defect. The theology of evolution is its strongest 
feature, its final outcome. Evolution makes a 
place for the Christ, and Revelation puts him in it. 
The Christ of theology only succeeds in wresting 
a minute part of the world from the cruel failure and 
ruin of creation. The Christ, on the theory of evolu- 
tion, is the last lavish outpouring of Infinite Love to 
perfect the Humanity on which Infinite Love had 
lavished uncounted ages of preparation. First, the 
hidden birth of matter ; then its constant develop- 
ment into finer and finer organisms, till it was fitted 
to become the temple of the Holy Ghost ; then the 
mystic and holy in-breathing by which the matter, 
the dust, the beast, the man, became a living soul: 
slow leading of this primitive but living soul 
— faint but vital spark of heavenly flame — along 



COMMENTS. 255 

and always upwards towards its source of life, till — 
not when God had discovered how defective was his 
work and vainly tried to mend it, but, knowing that 
it was good — when the fulness of time was come to 
which the whole work of creation had tended, when 
the fulness of time was come in which Humanity 
was wrought flexible and fine enough to receive him, 
God sent forth his Son into the world. Even then too 
early he came, it would appear ; for the world hardly 
received him. God seems always, in spite of the 
patient ages, a little in a hurry. The Infinite Energy 
always overflows. Life came before the earth was 
ready for it. Eternal Life came before the spiritual 
world could appreciate it. Apparently, life is so 
precious a boon that God could not wait to confer it. 
Certain it is that Creative Energy cares not to make 
life easy, only to make it possible. Just as soon as 
our globe was capable of sustaining organic life even 
by hard fighting, organic life was here. Man came 
as soon as the earth was ready for him — not ready 
to support him in ease, but so far ready as that a 
certain support could be wrested from her soil by the 
utmost exertion of his strength, his ingenuity, his 
perseverance. Life becomes easy only as man makes 
it easy for himself. Iron and water have been here 
ever since man has been here. Electricit}- has ever 
thrilled all vital space. The air has been listening 
to pulsate at the word of command, awaiting the 
centuries of man's development to become the messen- 
ger of his will. Therefore it must be that blessing 
is in the struggle before the victory. The ground 



256 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. 

was indeed accursed for man's sake, for man's benefit. 
He eats his bread in the sweat of his face, because 
sweat is better than slumber for his growth in all 
grace physical, mental, spiritual. 

Thus, also, it might seem, came Christ into the 
world prematurely. He was unappreciated; nay 
more, he was despised, and more than that, rejected; 
but not wholly. He came unto his own and his own 
received him not. But they were his own; not 
created for evil, not foredoomed to eternal ruin, but 
his own; weak, foolish, fierce, false, but still his 
own ; the mark of the beast not wholly erased from 
human brows, but always growing fainter for the 
new name that was to be written there. His own 
received him not ; but as many as received him, re- 
ceived with him power to retain him always, even 
unto the end of the world. 

So he was not premature ; for, though he was re- 
viled and crucified, he was never lost out of his 
world. The seed lodged — a tiny seed in a wide, 
wild world. Sun parched it, stones crushed it, cold 
chilled it; shallow soil, fierce storms, all harsh con- 
ditions, beset it ; but it took root, it pierced down- 
ward, it sprang upward. Its bloom and fruitage 
overspread the whole earth. The life of the soul, 
Eternal Life, has had as sharp a struggle as physical 
life, the life of earth ; but both have prevailed. In- 
finite Energy, Infinite Love alike made no mistake. 
Neither life came till the fulness of time was come. 
Both came in harmony with the grand and perfect 
order of evolution. 



COMMENTS. 257 

To the strength of the Infinite Energy, to the 
warmth of the Infinite Love, Humanity, frail and 
fearful, may confidently trust itself, in the full assur- 
ance, given not more to babes and sucklings by the 
Revelation of the Word than to developed intelli- 
gences through the Revelation of Science, and to 
longing hearts through the Revelation of Aspiration : 
the gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ 
our Lord ! 



CASUS BELLI. 

An explanation of the somewhat extraordinarily 
composite character of this book may, perhaps, re- 
lieve it from the charge of assumption and presump- 
tion which might be preferred against it. 

During the publication of the Spencer and Har- 
rison essays in the Nineteenth Century, a large and 
apparently respectable element in literary England 
began to discuss them on a basis which showed 
that Mr. Spencer was taken on Mr Harrison's 
word. It is difficult to imagine anything more 
discreditable to English scholarship. Mr. Wilfrid 
Ward, for instance, in the National Review, writes a 
long, elaborate, and interesting paper on the two 
essayists, and throughout the whole he accepts Mr. 
Harrison's renderings of Mr. Spencer's opinions, and 
criticises and condemns them as Mr. Spencer's. The 
very paragraph which I have quoted as everything 
that a paragraph should not be, Mr. Wilfrid Ward 
quotes as ' quite unanswerable common sense.' After 
all Mr. Spencer's protests and refusals even to dis- 
cuss the question whether and to whom awe, rever- 
ence, and veneration are due, Mr. Wilfrid Ward, 

258 



COMMENTS. 259 

exactly as if Mr. Spencer had not spoken, calmly 
affirms that Mr. Spencer teaches that 'the Unknowa- 
ble Energy is the true object of the sentiments of 
awe and worship,' and pursues a long argument ex- 
actly as if Mr. Spencer had affirmed what he reso- 
lutely and repeatedly refused to affirm. He quotes 
the statements that 4 Nothing can be known,' and * a 
sort of a something exists beyond our knowledge,' 
as if Mr. Spencer had made them and proceeded to 
found a religion on them, and gives no hint that Mr. 
Harrison made them, and that Mr. Spencer said pre- 
cisely the contrary. He gathers in a group some of 
the wildest perpetrations of Mr. Harrison's wind- 
swept logic, and declares that 4 Mr. Harrison seems to 
me, in this portion of his criticism, to reason with an 
accuracy and sobriety which are quite be} T ond praise.' 
4 So far he figures as before all things a sober and cau- 
tious thinker.' Utterly deaf and dead to the fact 
which glares through this volume — that Mr. Spencer 
and Mr. Harrison are wider than the poles asunder, 
he testifies that they have ' relentlessly pursued the 
path of negation, until they have arrived at the com- 
mon conclusion that all that is known is phenomenal 
Nature in its operation on mankind.' In vain for 
Mr. Ward are Mr. Spencer's repeated protestations 
that the Ultimate Reality, the Absolute Existence, 
Self-Life lies behind phenomenal Nature. 

Mr. Frederic Harrison bends over Mr. Spencer's 
Philosophy, vigorously and violently kneading it into 
Absolute Negation ; Mr. Herbert Spencer lays about 
him lustily in its rescue and defence as Absolute 



260 CASUS BELLI. 

Reality ; and Mr. "Wilfrid Ward, calmly surveying the 
battle, pronounces it to be Absolute Agreement. 

( The sky is blue, and beyond that is the outer Uni- 
verse, which I do not now discuss,' says Mr. Spencer. 

'Mr. Spencer maintains that the sky is bluish, 
and that there the Universe comes to an end/ says 
Mr. Harrison. 

' Mr. Spencer and Mr. Harrison are agreed,' says 
Mr. Ward, ' to blot out all color from the Universe.' 

It is true that when Mr. Harrison begins to ex- 
pound his own religion, Mr. Ward discovers ' a mar- 
vellous collapse of the critical and cautious spirit by 
which the earlier portion of Mr. Harrison's paper was 
distinguished.' 'Consistency and sobriety of reason 
vanish.' They could not vanish, because they were 
never there. But so long as that peculiar pawing and 
clawing which serve Mr. Harrison for argument were 
exerted on Mr. Ward's side, Mr. Harrison was a sober 
and accurate reasoner. When they made against 
Mr. Ward's theories, Mr. Harrison became instantly 
a lunatic. 

And The Spectator follows The National Revieiv and 
pats Mr. Wilfrid Ward on the head for his 'brilliant 
paper,' and talks of Mr. Harrison's ' exposure of Mr. 
Spencer,' and admires the adroitness with which Mr. 
Ward 'turns the tables on Mr. Frederic Harrison after 
the same fashion in which Mr. Frederic Harrison had 
turned them on Mr. Herbert Spencer.' The only 
fashion in which Mr. Harrison turned the tables on 
Mr. Spencer was to precipitate himself flat on the floor 
under a crash of tables with their legs in the air ! 



COMMENTS. 261 

And even the Honorable Mr. Justice Stephen 
argues against Mr. Spencer and Mr. Harrison as if 
they were on the same footing, conferring indeed the 
dignity of a more elaborate refutation upon Mr. Har- 
rison's dolls than upon Mr. Spencer's abstractions. 

All this unscholarly misrepresentation Mr. Spencer 
endures with a calmness which is impossible to ordi- 
nary mortals. To some it is exasperating. It does 
not belong to the class of crimes against property, but 
against life, against human rights. It is of the nature 
of murder and a rather aggravated kind of murder ; 
and it raises in the un philosophical and imperfectly 
Christianized mind a thirst for blood. When English- 
men, with all the prestige of their thousand-year-old 
Universities, and all the vantage-ground of their 
leisure classes and their long-established social order, 
rise up before the world and with minute demonstra- 
tion show that they do not know how to read, noth- 
ing seems to the American savage so proper, so desir- 
able, so imperative, as to rise up and slay them. For 
a while at least, swing low, sweet chariot of English 
culture ! The primary schools which in the United 
States pass for colleges cannot turn out a better 
article of imperfect apprehension, of clumsy state- 
ment, of crude reasoning, of judicial blindness, than 
the Mutual Admiration Societies of England are bill- 
ing and cooing over in each others' ranks. 

The sole plea that -can be offered in mitigation of 
damages is that these essays appeared from time to 
time in a periodical, and not at any time together, so 
that they could be comprehensively surveyed. A 



262 CASUS BELLI. 

careless reader, who should not have Mr. Spencer's 
essays at hand, might accept Mr. Harrison's ver- 
sion without delaying judgment for the search of last 
month's magazines. This is a feeble plea ; a careless 
reader has no moral right to be a writer. But un- 
questionably the American reader has an advantage 
in seeing all the essays spread out before him in the 
American book. He has only to turn a leaf to find 
that Mr. Harrison has turned a somersault. 

Until the simultaneous appearance of the essays, 
doubtless many American citizens were as ignorant 
of Mr. Spencer as are Mr. Harrison and Mr. Ward, 
though Heaven's grace was vouchsafed them not to 
undertake to criticise, much less to expound him. 
They had, without having read Mr. Spencer, taken 
him at his general ecclesiastical valuation, and Mr. 
Harrison as a member of the same group. The two 
men were but one distant, rather vague and tran- 
scendental luminary — a binary star, shining with a 
single and dubious lustre. But no sooner was the 
glass of direct scrutiny turned upon them as they 
rose simultaneously in the American volume than 
the two stars flew apart — the Spencer orb constantly 
waxing in real and enduring splendor ; while, if Mr. 
Frederic Harrison is a star at all, it is a dog-star. 

Following closely upon a discovery of the value of 
the book came the knowledge of its suppression. At 
first it was but an unimportant item of newspaper 
gossip. Personal interest revealed it as a momentous 
fact and a calamity. The story as told in the Lon- 



COMMENTS. 263 

don journals adds another shade to Mr. Harrison's 
ignominy and another ray to Mr. Spencer's glory. 

In the unjustifiable and indefensible absence of 
international law in the matter, any publisher in 
America can republish the works of any English 
author, in such style as he chooses, without reference 
or remuneration to the author. Mr. Frederic Har- 
rison, hearing that such a reprint was made of his 
and of Mr. Spencer's articles, addressed Mr. Spencer 
on the subject, to which Mr. Spencer made answer : — 

38 Queen's Gardens, Bayswater, W., May 27, 1885. 

Dear Sir, — Here are my replies to the questions put in your 
note of yesterday. 

Just before the- middle of January I received from my American 
friend, Professor Youmans, a letter dated January 2, containing, 
among others, the following paragraphs : — 

i And now we have something of a new embarrassment upon 
which I must consult you. There is a pretty sharp demand for the 
publication of your controversy with Harrison in a separate form, 
and the publishers favor it. The question is not simply whether it 
is desirable, for we cannot control it. There is danger that it will 
be done by others, and if that should occur it would be construed 
as a triumph of the Harrison party — the Spencerians having de- 
clined to go into it. 

' If I thought no one else would print the correspondence (i. e., 
the Nineteenth Century articles), I should be in favor of our not 
doing it. In the first place, for general effect, rhetoric against 
reason counts as about ten to one. The Comtists are reviving — 
Harrison is coming over to lecture in this country, and much will 
be made of his brilliant conduct of the controversy. In the next 
place he has this advantage of you: Your main work bearing upon 
the issue is to be sought elsewhere, while Harrison had accumu- 
lated all the materials of his assault and gives his whole case, so 
that the popular effect could not fail to be much in his favor. To 
the narrower circle of readers who can really appreciate the discus- 
sion, the republication would undoubtedly be an excellent thing, 



i 



264 CASUS BELLI. 

and I suppose after all it is only these that we should much care 
for. On the whole, it may be politic to reprint. What do you 
think about it ? \ 

There was thus raised a quite unexpected problem. I had sup- 
posed that the matter had ended with your letter to the Pall Mall 
Gazette; and having expressed (in the Nineteenth Century) my 
intention not to continue the controversy, I hoped it would drop. 
Here, however, came the prospect of a revival in another shape ; 
and I had to choose between republication by my American friends, 
or republication by your friends, with the implication that I was 
averse to it. Though I should have preferred passivity, yet, under 
the circumstances stated, I thought it best to assent to republica- 
tion. One objection, however, became manifest. While in my 
replies to you I had pointed out sundry of your many misrepresen- 
tations, I passed over others — one reason being that I could not 
trespass too much on the space of the Nineteenth Century and the 
attention of its readers. Now, however, when it was proposed 
that the statements contained in your articles should be re-dif- 
fused, and take a permanent form instead of a temporary form, I 
felt that I could not leave unnoticed these other misrepresenta- 
tions. Appearing in a volume issued by my American publishers, 
and edited by my American friend, the implication would have 
been that statements made by you to which no objection was raised 
were correct statements. If words in quotation marks tacitly as- 
scribed by you to me had not been disowned by me (p. 100), it 
would, of course, have been assumed that I had used them, and 
that I stood convicted of the absurdity which you allege on the 
assumption that I had used them. If it had not been shown that 
an opinion you debit me with (p. 118) is wholly at variance with 
opinions which I have expressed in three different places, it w r ould 
naturally have been concluded that I held the opinion. Hence it 
was clear that unless I was to authorize the stereotyping of these 
and other errors I must take measures to dissipate them. I there- 
fore pointed out to Professor Youmans the statements which re- 
quired notice, indicated the needful rectifications, and requested 
him to append these rectifications in his own way. At the same 
time I forwarded him a copy of the letter which you published in 
the Pall Mall Gazette, saying that 'if this reprint of the articles is 
published without this letter, he (you) will inevitably say that his 
final reply has been omitted. It is needful, therefore, that it 



comments. 265 

should be included.' And along with your letter I sent indications 
of the points in it which should be noticed. 

Do you think I was not justified in this course ? Do you think I 
ought to have withheld my consent to the republication by my 
friends, leaving your friends to republish ? Do you think that, 
having assented to republication, I ought to have let pass without 
correction your misstatements previously uncorrected? If you 
think either of these things, I imagine that few will agree with 
you. There is, however, an easy way of bringing fhe question to 
issue. All the articles are copyright in England, and can not be 
republished here without the consent of all concerned. I do not 
suppose that Mr. Knowles will raise any difficulty; and if you 
agree to the re-issue of them here, I am quite willing that they 
should be re-issued. If you think that anything said in refutation 
of your statements should not have been said, we can easily in- 
clude an appendix in which you can point out this ; and then, if 
you wish it, copies of the volume can be sent round to the press. 

Of course I preserve a copy of this letter with a view to possible 
future use. 

This letter was sent privately to Mr. Harrison, who 
replied to it publicly in the London Times the next 
clay, May 28, 1885. 

Dear Mb. Spencer, — I cannot admit that there is anything 
to justify you in being a party to the American reprint of articles 
of mine, without my knowledge or consent. I learn accidentally 
that a volume has appeared in Xew York, which consists of three 
recent articles of yours in the Nineteenth Century, printed alter- 
nately with three recent articles of mine, with an introduction, 
notes, and appendix. This re-issue of my articles was made with- 
out the knowledge of myself, or of the proprietor of the Nineteenth 
Century, and he tells me that it is a case of piracy. 

You now avow (in your letter to me of yesterday) that the vol- 
ume was issued by your American publishers, and was edited by 
your friend, Professor Youmans, after consultation with you, with 
your consent and assistance. You also avow that you furnished 
the editor with controversial comments on my articles, and re- 
quested him to append them in his own May — that is to say, you 
have abetted a clandestine reprint of three articles of mine, inter- 



266 CASUS BELLI. 

polated with notes supplied by yourself. I regard this, not only as 
an act of literary piracy, but as a new and most unworthy form of 
literary piracy. May I ask if it is proposed to hand you the profits 
of a book of which I am (in part) the author, or are these to be re- 
tained by your American publishers and friend ? 

To justify this act you now write that you expected republica- 
tion in America by my friends. This expectation rests, I can as- 
sure you, on a pure invention. No friend of mine, nor any person 
whatever in America or in England, has ever suggested to me the 
republication of my articles, nor have I ever heard or thought 
of such a project. You quote to me, as your authority, a letter 
from Professor Youmans, who simply says there is danger of its 
being done by others, and he adds that I am coming to lecture in 
America. Again, this is a pure invention. I have never thought 
of lecturing in America, or of going there, nor has any one on 
either side of the Atlantic suggested to me to do so. Those who 
' convey ' my writings will as readily invent my intentions. In- 
quiry would have shown that neither I nor my friends had any in- 
tention of reprinting any articles — much less yours. And I fail to 
see how an unverified report that they might be reprinted, coupled 
with an unverified report that I was going to lecture in America, 
could justify you in promoting and assisting in the unauthorized 
issue and sale of writings of mine. 

This is not a simple case of clandestine reprint. Those of us 
who do not take elaborate precautions are exposed to have what 
they write appearing in unauthorized American editions. But it 
does surprise me that an English writer should connive at this 
treatment of another English writer, with whom he had been car- 
rying on an honorable discussion. It is, I think, something new, 
even in American piracy, to re-issue an author's writings behind 
his back, and sell them interlarded with hostile comment. Re- 
prints, even while they plunder us, spare us the sight of our sen- 
tences broken on the same page with such amenities as ' he com- 
placently assumes,' ' loose and misleading statements,' etc. You 
avow, in your letter of yesterday, that you supplied these comments 
to my articles; and if internal evidence did not show them to be 
yours, by your offer to me to republish them now in England you 
treat them as yours. I know no instance of such a practice. It is 
as if I were piratically to reprint your ' Data of Ethics,' freely in- 
terspersed with a running commentary on your practice of ethics, 



COMMENTS. 267 

and were to justify my act on the ground that- 1 had had a contro- 
versy with you, and that I had heard your friends were about to re- 
print it. 

There is one minor point which serves to show the kind of publi- 
cation in which you have chosen to take part. My articles in this 
volume are followed by a cutting from a newspaper account of 
what the editor calls ' The Little Bethel of the Comtists.' As the 
volume bears as its sub-title the words, ' A Controversy between 
Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer,' that newspaper paragraph 
would only be relevant if it referred to practices in which I had 
some part, or which I approved. It is well known that I have 
nothing to do with anything of the kind, and never countenanced it. 
Nothing of the sort has ever been heard in Newton Hall, where 
for years past I have presented Posivitism as I understand it. 
The matter is a small bit of polemical mischief; those who are en- 
gaged in plunder are not likely to be fair. But I think it is quite 
unworthy of a place in a volume for which you are responsible, 
and which you have authorized and adopt. 

You now propose to me to republish this volume in England, 
where you admit it could not appear without the consent of all 
concerned. After what you have done, I must decline to act with 
you. I leave your conduct to the judgment of men of sense and 
of honor. 

Thereupon Mr. Spencer printed in the Times his 
own letter which had evoked this reply, adding to it 
the comments : — 

Mr. Harrison had this letter before him when he wrote his state- 
ment. Does the reader find that his statement produced an im- 
pression anything like that which my letter produces? The other 
comment is this: Asking whether I have any share in the profits, 
Mr. Harrison not only by this, but by his title, 'A New Form of 
Literary Piracy,' tacitly suggests that I have. Merely stating that 
the affair is purely the affair of the Messrs. Appleton, and that not 
even a thought about money ever entered my head concerning it, I 
draw attention to the readiness with which Mr. Harrison, without 
a particle of evidence, makes grave insinuations. And I do this 
because it will enable the reader to judge what need there probably 



268 CASUS BELLI. 

was for taking the measures I did to prevent the wider and more 
permanent diffusion of Mr. Harrison's misrepresentations. 

Concerning the newspaper extract describing a Comtist service 
I know nothing, and greatly regret that it was appended. I will at 
once ask to have it withdrawn. If three gentlemen, appointed in 
the usual way, decide that under the circumstances, as stated to 
me by Professor Youmans-, I was not justified in the course I took, 
I will, if Mr. Harrison wishes it, request Messrs. Appleton to sup- 
press the book and destroy the stereotype plates, and I will make 
good their loss to them. 

The correspondence was continued in the Times, 
June 2. 

To the Editor of the Times. 

Sir, — I will not pursue this matter further, nor will I insist on 
Mr. Spencer's fair offer to submit it to arbitration. It satisfies me 
if he will not claim any absolute and moral right to copyright in 
America my writings with rectifications of his own. I am accus- 
tomed to unauthorized reprints of what I write; and as I hear 
there is a brisk sale for these essays (quorum pars minima fid) I 
will only congratulate the Yankee editor on his 'cuteness. As 
Mr. Spencer, by his offer, now admits it to be possible that he 
made a mistake, I am ready to regard his share of it as an inad- 
vertence. I know too well his great generosity in money matters 
to suppose that any question of profit crossed his mind. But it 
certainly crossed some one's mind; and I referred to it only to con- 
vince him that eager partisans had led him into a mistake. It is 
not easy at any time to get him to see this, and to open his eyes I 
used for once plain words. Conscious that I had conducted a 
philosophical debate with an old friend with all the deference and 
admiration that I really feel for his genius, it did pain me to find 
myself treated as the proverbial dog whom any stick is good enough 
to beat. The only arbitration I now desire is that of some common 
friend who may convince him that I wish nothing more than a 
return to the position of philosophic friends who agree to differ 
about their respective systems. 

I am, etc., 

Frederic Harrison. 

June 1. 



COMMENTS. 269 

[Times, June 3.] 
MR. SPENCER AND MR. HARRISON. 

To the Editor of the Times. 

Sir, — Rather than have any further question with Mr. Har- 
rison, and rather than have it supposed that I intentionally ig- 
nored his copyright claim, I have telegraphed to Messrs. Appleton 
to stop the sale, destroy the stock and plates, and debit me with 
their loss. 

I am faithfully yours, 

Clovelly, June 2. Herbert Spencer. 

[Times, June 4-] 
MR. SPENCER AND MR. HARRISON. 
To the Editor of the Times. 

Sir, — Allow me to supplement my letter telegraphed yesterday, 
partly to explain how the thing arose, and partly to correct an im- 
pression made by your leader of to-day. I was wrong in assenting 
to the republication by Messrs. Appleton. I ought to have borne 
passively the threatened evils of republication by other publishers, 
and, as my friend has been connected with publishing in New 
York for thirty years, I supposed his impression that these were 
coming was correct. But my decision was made in a hurry, with- 
out due thought. Believing there was no time to lose, I tele- 
graphed reply, and by the next post indicated corrections to be 
made in the statements of my views. And here I wish to point 
out that the notes I indicated were not criticism of Mr. Harrison's 
opinions, but corrected versions of my own. Any others, if there 
are any, are Professor Youmans'. I go on to explain that my 
mind was so engrossed with the due presentation of the contro- 
versy that the question of copyright never occurred to me; and the 
thought that Mr. Harrison might not like his articles republished 
was excluded by the impression given me that others would repub- 
lish them if the Appletons did not. Hence my error. But my 
error does not, I think, excuse Mr. Harrison's insult. By cancel- 
ling the rest of the edition and the plates I have done all that re- 
mains possible to rectify the effects of my mistake. 
I am faithfully yours, 

Hfracombe, June 3. Herbert Spencer. 



270 CASUS BELLI. 

[Times, June 6.] 
MR. HARRISON AND MR. SPENCER. 
To the Editor of the Times. 

Sik, — May I once more trespass on your space by asking you to 
publish the following letter from Mr. Harrison ? 

I am faithfully yours, Herbert Spe*tcer. 

38 "Westbourne-terrace, W., June 4, 1885. 

Dear Mr. Spencer, — As you still appear to think (in spite of 
my public disclaimer) that I have brought against you a charge of 
desiring money profit out of this American reprint, I beg to say 
that I did not intend to make any such charge, and I do not believe 
that I have. I regret the use of any words which produced that 
impression on you. I am yours faithfully, 

Frederic Harrison. 

P. S. — You can use this letter as you think fit. 
Herbert Spencer, Esq. 

[Standard, June 10.] 
MR. SPENCER AND MR. HARRISON. 

To the Editor of the Standard. 

Sir, — The fact that the information to which it refers came 
through The Standard must be my excuse for asking you to pub- 
lish the following letter, a copy of which I have inclosed to Mr. 
Harrison, requesting him to post it after reading it. 

I am, sir, your obedient servant, Herbert Spencer. 

38 Qceen's-gardens, Bayswater, London, W., June 9. 
My Dear Youmans, — I returned home last night, and only 
this morning learned that in The Standard of Saturday last there 
was, in a telegram from New York, a statement to the effect that 
Messrs. Appleton declined to destroy the stock and plates of the 
reprinted controversy (as I had telegraphed them to do), on the 
score that the book would be reprinted by some other publisher. 
In this expectation they are probably right. But a reprint would 
necessarily be without the notes: since these, as implied Jn your 
preface, are your copyright in America. Now, though these notes 
— or, at least, those which I pointed out as needful — are correc- 
tions of erroneous statements of my views, yet, rather than have it 
supposed that I wished to take any advantage of Mr. Harrison in 



COMMENTS. 271 

making such corrections, I will submit to the evil of re-issue by 
another publisher without them; and I therefore repeat my request 
that the stock and stereo-plates may be destroyed, and the loss 
debited to me. 

One word respecting the proposal of the Appletons to share the 
author's profits between Mr. Harrison and myself. If any have at 
present accrued, or if, in consequence of refusal to do as I have 
above requested, any should hereafter accrue, then I wish to say 
that having been, and being now, absolutely indifferent to profit in 
the matter, I shall decline to accept any portion of the returns. 
Ever sincerely yours, Herbert Spencer. 

It will readily be seen by every one who has read 
the preceding essays that the inevitable stamp of 
character — Frederic Harrison, his mark — is placed on 
his letters as indelibly and vividly as on his essays, 
and that his way as a correspondent is exactly like 
his way as a controvertist. The scholar and philoso- 
pher of whose personal friendship he had more than 
once boasted, he thinks it seemly to characterize as 
a particularly depraved pirate. This 'philosophic 
friend ' is of such an eight-days-old-kittenish blind- 
ness that in order to pry open his eyes, a 'philosophic 
friend' is obliged to resort to the sharp nomenclature 
of the Billingsgate. This he terms ' using for once 
plain words.' In America we do not call it by that 
name, and we should expect any person above the 
rank of fishwomen to let Mr. Spencer wander to his 
life's end with closed eyes rather than open them by 
such an operation. 

4 1 know too well his great generosity in money 
matters to suppose that any question of profit crossed 
his mind ; ' why then did Mr. Harrison commit the 



272 CASUS BELLI. 

indescribable vulgarity of asking ' if it is proposed to 
hand you the profits?' Calmly, without wincing, 
Mr. Harrison demonstrates that he publicly launched 
a coarse innuendo, an insinuation of dishonesty, a 
sneer of greed, at his friend, knowing that it was ab- 
solutely baseless, and seeming not to know that it 
was absolutely base. Even when Mr. Spencer, much 
enforced, did show a hasty and precious spark of re- 
sentment, Mr. Harrison could not understand it. He 
regrets that calling a man a pirate, a novel and most 
unworthy pirate, enriching himself with other peo- 
ple's property, should 'produce an impression' other 
than friendly and philosophical. 

Mr. Spencer bears himself throughout like what he 
must be, a gentleman, a philosopher, and a Christian. 
He may not call himself a Christian. I do not know 
whether he calls himself a Christian, but he must 
submit to an abundant entrance into the Kingdom of 
Heaven on the password of the 'Inasmuch.' At 
the first note of discontent from Mr. Harrison he 
proposed an amicable and fair adjustment by joint 
republication in England, with entire freedom of com- 
ment to Mr. Harrison, — which Mr. Harrison sternly 
declined. Mr. Spencer was too great a villain for 
Mr. Harrison to have any dealings with. * After 
what you have done, I must decline to act with you. 
I leave your conduct to the judgment of men of sense 
and of honor.' 

It would seem as if the fatuity, the sublimity of 
insolence could no further go. Mr. Spencer would 
have been justified in paying no more attention to 



COMMENTS. 273 

Mr. Harrison's state of mind ; but, bent on justice, he 
overlooked manners, and again proffered redress, in 
the shape of arbitration. This also Mr. Harrison de- 
clined, but less sternly. The tide of virtue had 
ebbed. Mr. Spencer had ceased to be too much of a 
pirate for a business partner, and had suddenly lapsed 
into a desirable personal friend. Mr. Harrison had 
discovered that all he wanted now was to be ' philo- 
sophic friends' with Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spencer was 
surely justified in praying vengeance to take any 
shape but that. No wonder that with such a con- 
tingency confronting him he summarily telegraphed 
to America to stop the sale of the book and destroy 
the stock and plates ! 

Here, it seems to me, the duties of Mr. Spencer 
and the rights of Mr. Harrison regarding the book 
ended. Our lack of international copyright, barba- 
rously iniquitous as it is, is still a fact, and has to 
be considered. Mr. Spencer, by cancelling his own 
share in the publication, had done all that he could 
do to appease Mr. Harrison. In the offer to submit 
to arbitration, in the offer to republish jointly with 
Mr. Harrison in England, in the submission of the 
American publishers to Mr. Spencer's suppression of 
the book, and in the habit of the American publish- 
ers to pay foreign authors the same rates as American 
authors, the spirit of international copyright law was 
observed. It must be supposed, it may be assumed, 
that when a man publishes anything he wishes it to 
be public — to be as widely spread as possible. It 
may be legitimately assumed that he does not wish 



274 CASUS BELLI. 

it to be hidden in a corner of the world, published 
in one little angle of the universe and hushed up in 
the open area. Mr. Harrison's complaint that the 
book was published with notes hostile to himself is 
childish. All the notes were in correction of Mr. 
Harrison's misrepresentations, not in refutation of Mr. 
Harrison's arguments. It is but further illustrative 
of Mr. Harrison's methods that, instead of apologiz- 
ing to Mr. Spencer for making these misrepresenta- 
tions, he attacks him with a bludgeon for correcting 
them. But any grievance which Mr. Harrison may 
have supposed himself to suffer would be entirely 
redressed by publication in England with whatever 
explanations and protestations he chose to accom- 
pany it. 

The situation, however, could be nothing bettered, 
but rather made worse, by an American re-issue 
without co-operation or consultation with either of 
the authors, or any warning notes. Such a re- 
issue, contemplated no doubt with the best inten- 
tions on the part of the American publishers, seemed 
an ingenious combination of everything that ought 
not to be done. It might indeed not include Mr. 
Spencer in the iniquity of ' piracy,' but it did him 
the very wrong — of disseminating uncontradicted, 
false views of his theory, and false rendering and 
false quotations of liis words — which he had com- 
mitted ' piracy ' to prevent, and which had already 
deceived the very elect, as witness Mr. WHfrid 
Ward and the Spectator. It was redressing, or not 
repeating, for Mr. Frederic Harrison the grievance of 



CCOJDIENTS. 275 

the notes, but it was not redressing but rather re- 
newing for him the grievance of republication with- 
out his consent. A feeble private protest could have 
no other effect, naturally, than to satisfy one's own 
conscience ; but when I found that the book was 
seriously threatened in all its naked malfeasance, I 
picked out instantly my few small, smooth stones 
from the brook, to let fly at the foe, while waiting 
for some better champion to gird on his too laggard 
sword. My pebbles may not hit Goliath, much less 
fell him, but it will not be because they are not slung 
with a hearty good- will ; and in such a cause as this — 

' 'Tis better to have fought and lost, 
Than never to have fought at all.' 

If Mr. Harrison has any curiosity as to the persons 
to whom the profits of this book are to accrue, I 
cheerfully answer, to myself. It is true the publishers 
frankly avow at the outset that there will probably be 
no profits, and that the publication at this time and 
in this manner promises to be the sacrifice of all 
prospective gain. Fortunately, one can not only culti- 
vate literature on a little oatmeal, but oatmeal but- 
tered, sugared, and eaten smoking hot is a delicious 
viand, not to say a wholesome aliment; wherefore 
that is no sacrifice. But if, on the other hand, the 
book glistens with Golcondan treasure, as it is well 
to assure one's publishers, not so much perhaps from 
conviction as to give them something to live up to, 
let me persuade Mr. Harrison be} T ond doubt that I 
shall unhesitatingly appropriate it all. By his wan- 



276 CASUS BELLI. 

ton sneers at Mr. Spencer's honor, by his churlish 
refusal to accept Mr. Spencer's conciliatory proffers, 
by his ignorant inability to recognize any claims 
which thought has upon its votaries, he has forfeited 
all moral rights which we are bound to respect ; and 
legal rights he had none to begin with. He stands 
before the American public as a man who was willing 
to stab his friend, but demanded as his standard of 
honor that his friend should lie still and be stabbed 
without making any ado about it. The only punish- 
ment, it appears, which he can be made to feel is to 
see c the profits ' pouring into other hands than his 
own. In view of this, if the 4 'cute Yankee ' Publish- 
ers issue occasional bulletins of i Fifteen Thousand 
called for,' ' Fiftieth Thousand now ready,' 4 Hundred 
and Seventieth Thousand will be issued early next 
week,' a judicious public will perhaps refrain from 
too close a scutiny of the figures upon which these 
announcements are based ! I have but one word of 
quarrel with the ''cute Yankee ' Editor of the Ameri- 
can Reprint, who has vigorously and amply presented 
his case, and who remarks, with melancholy humor, 
that, in spite of Mr. Harrison's satirical congratula- 
tions on his sharp practice, he was to be 'the only 
party to get nothing. Among the several stools 
occupied by authors and publishers, it was his fate to 
sit on the ground.' The only thing for which he 
deserves this abrupt adoption of lowly posture is for 
speaking of Mr. Harrison's 'brilliant conduct of the 
controversy.' It is a misuse of terms to call this reck- 
less pitchforking of words from one heap to another a 



COMMENTS. 277 

8 conduct of a controversy.' A dancing dervish might 
as well be complimented on his brilliant conduct of a 
Columbian voyage of discovery. The dancing dervish 
is more nimble than Columbus, but he gets nowhere 
and discovers nothing. The ' 'cute Yankee ' was 
much nearer to scientific accuracy, Positive Philoso- 
phy and elegant literature, as well as to popular 
appreciation, in the private remark — which he will 
never forgive me for reproducing — in which his 
honest indignation characterized the 'brilliant Posi- 
tivist ' as 4 that blackguard who is founding a new 
religion.' 

To those who sometimes contemplate with mis- 
giving the acrimony of our political contests, Mr; 
Harrison's mendacious and audacious performances 
ma}^ even minister comfort. They show at least 
that the violence and slander of an electoral cam- 
paign are not the local inflammation of republican 
institutions, to be treated only by weakening those 
institutions; but are an hereditory scrofula in the 
blood, common to the English University man of 
letters and to the over-worked and under-taught 
American editor ; more flagrant on the serene heights 
of Philosophy than down in the arena where men 
are wrestling strenuously and openly for the great 
political prizes; but always and everywhere to be 
checked and removed only by a toning up of the 
whole system, a constant rejuvenation and develop- 
ment of the man as distinguished from the brute. 

Will it be considered presumptuous in me to beg 
Mr. Herbert Spencer henceforth to eschew contro- 



278 CASUS BELLI. 

versy ? There are hosts of readers who can take care 
of Mr. Frederic Harrison and his kind, and who would 
be doing nothing more worth, if we were not doing 
that. But Mr. Spencer has other and better worlds 
to conquer, for which our weapons are all untempered, 
our powers all inadequate. To that loftier and tran- 
quil work we pray him to devote his whole heart and 
soul and mind and strength. 



6l -n't 



